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California leaders rebuke Sessions as ‘going to war’ over state immigration policy

He arrived a day after suing California over its laws to shield immigrants living in the state illegally

A long-simmering battle between the Trump administration and California over immigration boiled over Wednesday, with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions deriding the state’s “irrational, unfair and unconstitutional policies” and Gov. Jerry Brown accusing the federal government of launching “a reign of terror.”

“This is basically going to war against the state of California,” Brown declared.

As the Justice Department formally filed a legal challenge to state immigration laws, Sessions told a gathering of law enforcement officers in Sacramento that California was attempting to keep federal immigration officials from doing their jobs, and he charged Democrats with advancing the political agendas of “radical extremists.”

He took particular aim at Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who had warned immigrant communities about recent federal raids in the Bay Area, and at Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, for praising her actions.

“So here’s my message to Mayor Schaaf: How dare you?” Sessions said of the Brown protege. “Contrary to what you may hear from open-borders radicals, we are not asking California, Oakland or anyone else to actively, effectively enforce immigration laws.”

The remarks drew protests and sharp rebukes from state leaders, underscoring huge rifts over the role of law enforcement in federal immigration policy.

President Trump has made restricting immigration a central focus of his agenda and has frequently criticized California for resistance to his calls to increase deportations. On Wednesday, the White House confirmed that Trump would make his first visit to California since becoming president next week, to assess prototypes for the border wall he wants built between California and Mexico and to attend a GOP fundraiser.

California Democratic leaders and the state’s top law enforcement officer responded with war talk of their own, describing Sessions’ actions as unprecedented. In fiery tweets, speeches and at a news conference at the Capitol, the Democrats said the Justice Department lawsuit is based on lies and challenges California’s sovereignty.

The governor called Sessions’ actions a political stunt, aimed at distracting the public from guilty pleas made by Trump’s advisors in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“Let’s face it, the Trump White House is under siege,” Brown said. “Obviously, the attorney general has found it hard just to be a normal attorney general. He’s been caught up in the whirlwind of Trumpism … [and is] initiating a reign of terror.”

State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), author of one of the laws targeted by the legal challenge, accused Sessions of having ideology based on “white supremacy and white nationalism.”

De León said he is directing former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., under contract to provide legal advice to the state Senate, to help formulate a response to submit in court. On a conference call with reporters, Holder said legal precedent makes clear that the federal government cannot insist that a state use its resources to enforce federal immigration law.

“From my perspective, the Trump administration’s lawsuit is really a political and unconstitutional attack on the state of California’s well-established rights under our system of government,” Holder said.

Administration officials allege the laws, passed by the Legislature last year and signed by Brown, blatantly obstruct federal immigration law and thus violate the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which gives federal law precedence over state enactments.

State Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has pledged to defend the measures in court, saying they work in concert with federal laws. “Our teams work together to go after drug dealers, to combat gang violence, to take down sex-trafficking rings, and we have no intention of changing that,” he said Wednesday.

In his speech to more than 100 police chiefs, sheriffs and other law enforcement officers, Sessions argued that the Trump administration did not reject immigration, but said the U.S. should not reward those who unlawfully enter the country with benefits, such as legal status, food stamps and work permits.

He said the federal government sued California to invalidate and immediately freeze what he called unjust laws.

“We are going to fight these irrational, unfair and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you and our federal officers,” Sessions said as he finished his speech to the California Peace Officers Assn., and some officers stood in ovation. “You can be certain about this: We have your back, and you have our thanks.”

As the group welcomed Sessions with applause, a statewide coalition of immigrant rights groups gathered outside to protest his arrival.

The event is usually a time for law enforcement officers to mingle with lawmakers, lobby for legislation and receive guidance from leaders on law enforcement priorities across the state. But Sessions’ appearance swept the attention away.

Police officers said the state’s immigration laws had not impeded their jobs so far, but the constant battles between state and federal leaders were affecting their relationships with federal partners.

Fairfield Police Chief Randy Fenn said the lawsuit raised concerns about whether law enforcement agencies would be caught in the middle of a larger immigration battle.

“We are waiting to see how this shakes out,” Fenn said.

Neil Gallucci, second vice president of the state peace officers group, said Sessions’ opinion was important to understand as the federal lawsuit had the potential to change California laws.

“Atty. Gen. Sessions is the top law enforcement officer in the United States of America,” Gallucci said. “It would be foolish for us not to listen to where we may be headed and to understand what all the issues are. That is what this forum is for.”

Though the state government’s foray into immigration issues has drawn criticism outside California in recent months, it has broad support within the state. A January poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found 58% of likely voters wanted state and local immigration action. Among all adults, support rose to 65% of those surveyed.

Law enforcement officials have been divided on the issue. The most contested of the statutes — the so-called sanctuary state law — limits state and local law enforcement agencies from using any resources to hold, question or share information about people with federal immigration agents, unless they have violent or serious criminal convictions.

For many officers across the state, that won’t change much of their daily work. Some police and sheriff’s agencies already have developed similar restrictions on working with immigration agents, either through their own policies or under local “sanctuary city” rules.

The California Police Chiefs Assn. moved its official position from opposed to neutral after final changes to the bill, but the California State Sheriffs’ Assn. remained opposed.

Outside Sessions’ speech Wednesday, a few hundred people gathered to protest. Right before the speech began, protesters spilled out onto a major street, blocking traffic, and then marched around the building.

Maria Isabel Serrano, 46, from Imperial County, said the attorney general should focus on violent crimes, not immigration.

“This is the only place where we have a sanctuary,” Serrano said in Spanish. “This lawsuit is uncalled for.”

California tried to make it harder for ICE to round up immigrants. So the federal government is suing the state.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is visiting California to sue it.

The Department of Justice has just filed a lawsuit against the state over three laws it passed in 2017 that limit government officials’ and employers’ ability to help federal immigration agents, and that give California the power to review conditions in facilities where immigrants are being detained by the feds. Sessions, in a Wednesday speech to the California Peace Officers’ Association, a law enforcement union, is giving the message in person.

It’s a huge escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against “sanctuary cities” that limit local-federal cooperation on immigration enforcement. After a year of slow-moving or unsuccessful attempts to block “sanctuary” jurisdictions from getting federal grants, Sessions is moving to stop them from passing laws that limit cooperation to begin with. And he’s starting with a shot across the bow: targeting the bluest state in the union, whose 2017 bills represented a model for progressives to use federalism against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

California, like any other “sanctuary” jurisdiction, isn’t stopping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from being able to arrest, detain, or deport immigrants. In fact, ICE has already responded to the 2017 laws in its own way — by escalating raids in California and claiming that the state’s sanctuary laws force ICE to get more aggressive in its tactics.

Sessions’s lawsuit, legally speaking, is about ensuring that the feds can use any tool in the toolbox of federal immigration enforcement policy, without any restrictions from progressive cities and states. Politically speaking, it’s the next phase in a battle the Trump administration and California are equally enthusiastic about having: an ongoing culture war between progressive politicians who feel a duty to make their immigrant residents feel as safe as possible, and an administration (and its backers) whose stated policy is that no unauthorized immigrant should feel safe.

The lawsuit is mostly a fight to let government employees and business owners cooperate with ICE if they want

The administration’s new lawsuit doesn’t address all of California’s restrictions on cooperation — including some of the “sanctuary” policies that Sessions and other Trump administration officials have complained the most about (like limits on when local jail officials can agree to hold unauthorized immigrants for 48 hours after they’d otherwise be released so federal agents can pick them up).

Instead, it aims at pieces of three different laws California passed last year: one that strictly limits law enforcement cooperation with ICE, one restricting what employers can do when ICE engages in workplace raids, and one about reviews of immigration detention facilities.

Here’s the rundown:

SB 54 (California Values Act): the “sanctuary” law. The Trump administration is suing to allow local law enforcement officials in California to do two things that SB 54 now prevents them from doing: 1) tell federal agents when an immigrant will be released from jail or prison, or give them other “nonpublic” personal information other than the immigrant’s immigration status; and 2) transfer immigrants directly into federal custody from local jails without a warrant from a judge for their arrest (though local officials are allowed to do this if an immigrant has committed certain serious crimes).

The Trump administration argues that the restrictions on what local officials can tell federal ones about a detained immigrant violate federal law — specifically, a provision that bars local and state governments from telling their officials not to share information about “the immigration status … of any individual.” This is the same provision the Trump administration has been using in its attempts to block “sanctuary” jurisdictions from getting federal grants.

California argues that sharing information about when someone will be released from jail or prison is different from sharing information about their “immigration status” itself, so it’s legal for the state to put restrictions on the former. That argument has been upheld by a federal judge in the state — though, notably, not in the same district where the Justice Department is suing.

(Ironically, the ruling that refusing to share release dates didn’t violate federal law came in a civil lawsuit filed against the city of San Francisco by the parents of Kate Steinle, whose murder has become a cause célèbre for immigration hawks including President Trump himself.)

The Justice Department is also arguing that California is restricting federal immigration enforcement by requiring a warrant from a judge to take an immigrant into custody, claiming that federal immigration law was designed to use civil “warrants” from the executive branch (since being in the US without papers is a civil offense, and deportation is technically a civil punishment, rather than criminal).

AB 103: the detentionreview law. The DOJ is suing to strike down a law that requires the California attorney general to review any facility where immigrants are being detained by federal agents while waiting for an immigration court date or their deportation (or where unaccompanied minors are being held while waiting to be placed with a relative).

The lawsuit argues that where immigrants are detained is a “law-enforcement decision” and California is improperly interfering with it; it also complains that California isn’t placing these restrictions on any other local or federal agency and is targeting immigration enforcement.

AB 450: the workplace-raid law. Just like the DOJ is suing to let law enforcement cooperate more broadly with federal agents with its challenge to SB 54, it’s suing to let employers cooperate with federal agents during workplace raids or audits. The feds are suing to strike down provisions that prevent employers from letting ICE agents access “nonpublic areas” of the workplace during raids or giving ICE agents access to employee records without a judicial warrant. (Though ICE agents would still be allowed to look over an employer’s I-9 files, the form to verify an employee’s ability to work in the US legally.)

And it’s suing to stop employers from having to notify their employees within 72 hours of getting a notice of inspection of I-9 files from ICE and notify them again within 72 hours of getting the results if the employee has been flagged in the system as working illegally.

The DOJ argues that these restrictions “have the purpose and effect of interfering with the enforcement of the [federal] prohibition on working without authorization.”

This is basically the heart of the lawsuit: that California passed laws that are designed to stop the federal government from enforcing its laws, and that’s not permissible under the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. (In a subplot, the lawsuit cites the Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. US in 2012, which struck down parts of a state immigration enforcement law passed by Republicans who thought the Obama administration was shirking its duty on immigration.)

In the federal government’s view, “California has no lawful interest in assisting removable aliens to evade federal law enforcement.” But California, of course, argues it does: that protecting the safety and well-being of California residents means forcing ICE to meet higher standards of due process before engaging in actions that can affect not only unauthorized immigrants but legal immigrants and US citizens. And this is where the real divide lies.

The term “sanctuary” gives the totally misleading impression that cities and states can stop ICE from entering, or from arresting immigrants. They can’t. The laws that immigration hawks have traditionally labeled “sanctuary” policies — a label that, in the wake of the 2016 election, some progressives and Democrats have embraced — are designed to make it harder for the federal government to use local governments as leverage in immigration enforcement.

So when those laws pass, ICE has to do things the hard way: tracking down immigrants after they’re released from jail, for example, instead of just picking them up directly.

That sort of ICE activity is more visible — and often more disruptive to immigrants’ daily lives. When the Trump administration has been criticized for its aggressive immigration tactics, like arresting immigrants in courthouses or in their driveways, it has blamed “sanctuary cities” for forcing them to.

But the Trump administration has also made a point to hype enforcement in “sanctuary” jurisdictions as a way to send a message that immigrants are not safe there. So even as the Justice Department sues California for making it too hard to enforce immigration law, ICE is as visible in the state as ever.

The Trump administration has vocally criticized California officials for trying to impede ICE — it was furious with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for alerting the public that the February sweep was coming, for example. But it’s important to understand that the lawsuit isn’t really about ICE’s abilities, but rather about making it easier for the agency to do its job — or, to put it another way, it’s about how many tools ICE has in its immigration enforcement toolbox.

And it’s also, just like the stepped-up raids, another way to remind immigrants that no matter who calls California a “sanctuary,” it can’t really protect immigrants from deportation.

This is a fight both sides are eager to have

Sessions isn’t just going to Sacramento at random. He’s announcing the lawsuit at the convention of the California Peace Officers’ Association — which lobbied against SB 54 and which, according to its executive director, invited Sessions to provide some “clarity” about how local police could work with federal agents in general in the wake of the law.

What Sessions is giving them instead is a promise to fight for them against the local and state politicians who are trying to keep them from doing their jobs: “The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair, and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you,” he’s expected to say Wednesday. “I believe that we are going to win.”

In reality, law enforcement agents and officials in California (like the rest of America) have been divided on local cooperation with immigration enforcement: Some of them oppose laws like California’s because they hinder officers’ power to decide how to do their jobs, while others want to make sure immigrants aren’t scared out of reporting crimes by worrying local police will turn them over to ICE.

But picking a fight with Democratic politicians — especially in liberal-caricature California — on behalf of cops is the best possible frame for the Trump administration politically. Ever since the presidential primary, Trump has gotten leverage out of attacking “sanctuary cities” for harboring criminals. It’s allowed him to use his favorite theme — that immigrants are criminal and dangerous — while attacking his political opponents.

The legal prospects of the new lawsuit aren’t very good in the short term. Even if the DOJ prevails in the district court, it’ll have to go through the liberal (and presidentially antagonized) Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Politically, though, it’s less important that the Trump administration wins this fight than that it’s picking it at all — it’s reminding its base who the good guys and bad guys are.

Of course, that’s also true for the California government — it’s just that the “good guy” and “bad guy” labels are reversed. California has all but courted a lawsuit from the Trump administration. Attorney General Xavier Becerra left a promising career in the House of Representatives to lead the legal resistance on the West Coast.

Officials have barely bothered to conceal their glee at the news that they’re being sued. “BRING IT ON!” wrote Kevin de León (the state legislator who wrote SB 54) in a Facebook post. Gov. Jerry Brown tweeted at the attorney general: “Jeff, these political stunts may be the norm in Washington, but they don’t work here. SAD!!!”

This isn’t just about the electoral optics for California Democrats in a majority-minority state, in a midterm that could finally push out some of the state’s remaining congressional Republicans. It’s also about the message being sent to immigrants — for Democrats and the administration alike.

The fight over “sanctuary” policies is ultimately a fight over whether fear is a useful tool in immigration enforcement or an evil that can poison whole communities. The official position of the Trump administration is that any unauthorized immigrant in the US should be “looking over [her] shoulder” and worried that ICE will come after her at any time. The biggest change to policy under Trump hasn’t been the scope of deportations or even of arrests — it’s been the aggressive messaging that anyone could be next.

Local and state officials who see unauthorized immigrants as part of their own communities, and who are concerned about the effects that targeting unauthorized immigrants will have on their legal immigrant neighbors and US citizen children, are trying to combat that fear. Laws that force ICE to put more effort into arresting and detaining immigrants are one way to do that. Simply sending the message that some politicians are looking out for immigrants and fighting for them is another — probably not as effective, but something nonetheless.

Fighting in court over California’s laws allows both sides to send the message they want. But in the meantime, ICE will keep working to make sure that its presence is felt in the state, “sanctuary” or no.

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North Korea’s Kim Jong-un meets South Korean envoys

China joins US in imposing sanctions against North Korea

China urges North Korea to stop missile tests

North Korea says it’s willing to hold talks with US and halt nuclear pursuit while negotiations last: South Korea

North Korea is willing to hold talks with the U.S. on denuclearization and will suspend nuclear tests while those talks are under way, South Korea said.

The news comes after a delegation returned from the North where it met leader Kim Jong Un.

North and South Korea will also hold their first summit in more than a decade next month at the border village of Panmunjom.

Published 12 Hours Ago Updated 9 Hours AgoReuters

North and South Korea agree to hold summit talks 12 Hours Ago | 00:28

North Korea is willing to hold talks with the United States on denuclearization and will suspend nuclear tests while those talks are under way, the South said on Tuesday after a delegation returned from the North where it met leader Kim Jong Un.

North and South Korea, still technically at war but enjoying a sharp easing in tension since the Winter Olympics in the South last month, will also hold their first summit in more than a decade next month at the border village of Panmunjom, the head of the delegation, Chung Eui-yong, told a media briefing.

“North Korea made clear its willingness to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and the fact there is no reason for it to have a nuclear programme if military threats against the North are resolved and its regime is secure,” the head of the delegation, Chung Eui-yong, told a media briefing.

“The North also said it can have frank talks with the United States on denuclearization and the normalisation of ties between North Korea and the United States,” Chung added.

He cited the North as saying it would not carry out nuclear or missile tests while talks with the international community were under way. North Korea has not carried out any such tests since November last year.

Reacting to the news, President Donald Trump tweeted: “We will see what happens!”

Washington and Pyongyang have been at loggerheads for months over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes, with Trump and Kim Jong Un trading insults and threatening war. North Korea has regularly vowed never to give up its nuclear programme, which it sees as an essential deterrent and “treasured sword” against U.S. plans for invasion.

The United States, which stations 28,500 troops in the South, a legacy of the Korean War, denies any such plans.

To ensure close communication, the two Koreas, whose 1950-53 conflict ended in a mere truce, not a peace treaty, will set up a hotline between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, Chung said.

The last inter-Korean summit was in 2007 when late former president Roh Moo-hyun was in office.

The agreement came on the heels of a visit made by a 10-member South Korean delegation led by Chung to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on Monday in hopes of encouraging North Korea and the United States to talk to one another.

Kim Jong Un met senior South Korean government officials for the first time and said it was his “firm will to vigorously advance” inter-Korean ties and pursue reunification, the North’s official news agency said.

“Through this delegation visit, the South Korean government created a very important opportunity to manage North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats, prevent war on the Korean peninsula and create military trust going forward,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute.

Tensions between the two Koreas eased during the Olympics in South Korea, where Moon hosted a high-level North Korean delegation and the two sides presented a joint women’s ice hockey team. Kim Jong Un had invited Moon to North Korea for a summit, which was the first such request from a North Korean leader to a South Korean president.

US-South Korea drills to go on

North Korea has boasted of developing nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the United States, in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, but Pyongyang and Washington both say they want a diplomatic solution to the standoff.

The first inter-Korean talks in more than two years were held early this year to bring North Korea to the Winter Olympics, when South Korea and the United States also postponed an annual joint large-scale military exercise that North Korea views as a preparation for invasion.

During this week’s visit, a senior Blue House official said North Korea was informed it was not feasible to postpone the joint military drills between South Korea and the United States again and that Kim Jong Un acknowledged the situation.

Kim Jong Un said he understood the drills, expected in April, would be of a similar scale seen in previous years, the official said. The North Korean leader also had a request for the world: that he be seriously acknowledged as a dialogue counterpart, said the official.

The South’s delegation leader, Chung, said he would travel to the United States to explain the outcome of the visit to North Korea and that he had a message from North Korea he will deliver to Trump.

Chung will later visit China and Russia, while Suh Hoon, the head of South Korea’s spy agency and another member of the delegation, will head to Japan.

U.S. Considers Broad Curbs on Chinese Imports, Takeovers

By Andrew Mayeda and Jennifer Jacobs

March 6, 2018, 5:00 PM CSTUpdated on March 6, 2018, 5:29 PM CST

USTR investigating China’s intellectual-property practices

Trump administration considering tariffs on consumer goods

The Trump administration is considering clamping down on Chinese investments in the U.S. and imposing tariffs on a broad range of its imports to punish Beijing for its alleged theft of intellectual property, according to people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office last year began investigating China’s IP practices under a seldom-used trade law that gives President Donald Trump powers to impose trade restrictions to protect American commerce from unfair trading actions by foreign nations. An announcement about the investigation is anticipated in the coming weeks.

The move would escalate tensions already running hot over Trump’s plan to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, risking retaliation from allies and major trading partners like China and rankling Republican lawmakers over the economic costs. Trump struck a defiant tone this week, tweeting that he’d welcome a trade war.

In a blow to the free-trade wing of Trump’s team, White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn announced on Tuesday he is resigning. The dollar fell and an exchange-traded fund linked to U.S. stocks tumbled in after-hours trading.

Wide Tariffs

Under the most severe scenario being weighed, the U.S. could impose tariffs on a wide range of Chinese imports, from shoes and clothing to consumer electronics, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions aren’t public.

The Trump administration could combine the tariffs with restrictions on Chinese investments in the U.S., which are reviewed for national-security risks by Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., the people said. The new measures being considered by the administration could go beyond even domestic security considerations.

The U.S. has long been wary of China’s push to develop its own semiconductor industry that could compete with American firms. That concern was highlighted in a letter made public Tuesday, in which the Treasury Department said Singapore-based Broadcom Ltd.’s hostile takeover attempt of Qualcomm Inc. could pose a national security risk. The worry is Broadcom could harm Qualcomm’s innovation, allowing China to expand its influence in key wireless technology, according to the letter dated March 5.

Forced Reciprocity

With the probe into China, known as a Section 301 action, U.S. officials are also considering a more targeted approach that would seek to rein in Chinese investments, the people said. The administration is looking at ways to enforce reciprocity with China on foreign investment, meaning the U.S. would only allow takeovers in sectors that U.S. companies can access in China, according to the people.

U.S. officials are still examining various options, and USTR could decide to do nothing, the people said, adding that an announcement is expected next month. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on an ongoing process, adding that no final decisions have been made.

A senior Chinese official warned that potential tariffs could harm the global trading system, and the Chinese government has been studying curbs on U.S. products such as soybeans.

Trump has fanned the flames, declaring that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” Mnuchin, speaking before a congressional panel on Tuesday, said the administration’s objective is to achieve a “fair and balanced” trading relationship with China. America’s trade gap in goods with the Asian nation surged 8 percent last year to a record $375 billion.

Mnuchin said the U.S. isn’t trying to provoke a trade war with the tariffs, an action that he backed. “The good news” is that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump have a “very good relationship and communicate regularly,” said Mnuchin.

Trade Backlash

Wide-ranging tariffs on goods made in China may also provoke a backlash from U.S. retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. The retail industry successfully pushed back last year against a proposal by Republican leaders in Congress to apply a border tax on imports.

USTR has argued in the past that Beijing uses a range of practices to force companies to transfer IP, and Chinese entities engage in widespread theft of U.S. trade secrets. U.S. businesses in China have long complained about being forced to hand over technology as the price of gaining access to the Asian market.

American officials are concerned China will piggyback off their nation’s technology as part of its strategy to become a leader in artificial intelligence and other advanced industries.

U.S. companies have been urging the Trump administration to negotiate with Beijing before imposing any penalties, according to industry lobbyists. That may be difficult, given that the main channel of economic dialogue between the two countries has broken down. However, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui said this week that China will host talks on trade issues with U.S. officials.

Under the law, the U.S. can impose duties or other barriers on the goods and services of the foreign country that undermined American commerce. It can also negotiate agreements under which the foreign nation would commit to end the offending tactic.

The government is supposed to come up with a solution that impacts foreign goods and services at a level equivalent to the damage done to American industry. Last year, an independent commission on U.S. intellectual property estimated that the annual cost to the U.S. economy in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets from all sources exceeds $225 billion and could be as high as $600 billion. China is the world’s principal IP infringer, the commission said.

China Spends More on Domestic Security as Xi’s Powers Grow

Beijing invests in policing at home amid push by president to solidify authority

China has hired more police and invested in domestic surveillance technology; above, security personnel on duty in Beijing on Tuesday during the annual meeting of the national legislature.PHOTO: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

By Josh Chin

Updated March 6, 2018 7:22 p.m. ET

BEIJING—China has substantially increased spending on domestic security, official figures show, reflecting mounting concern about threats inside its borders as President Xi Jinping moves to acquire more power and reassert the authority of the Communist Party.

Beijing’s budgets for internal and external security have grown faster than the economy as a whole for several years, but domestic security spending has grown far faster—to where it exceeds the national defense budget by roughly 20%.

Home SecurityChina’s spending on domestic securityoutpaces military spending, driven in part byan increase in Xinjiang.National security spending

China has turned the northwestern region of Xinjiang into a vast experiment in domestic surveillance. WSJ investigated what life is like in a place where one’s every move can be monitored with cutting-edge technology. Video: Clément Bürge/WSJ; Image: DeepGlint

Across China, domestic security accounted for 6.1% of government spending in 2017, the Ministry of Finance said. That translates into 1.24 trillion yuan ($196 billion) and compares with 1.02 trillion yuan in central-government funding for the military.

The numbers, revealed in an annual budget report released this week, help illustrate the scale of a recent intensification of security and surveillance across China, particularly in Xinjiang and Tibet, minority-heavy areas on the country’s periphery.

The spending numbers are “very consistent with the heavy securitization that’s going on,” said Adrian Zenz, a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany who discovered the numbers in Monday’s report and whose research into Chinese security spending is due to be published soon by the Jamestown Foundation.

In Xinjiang the government has woven a web of surveillance, with checkpoints, high-definition cameras, facial scanners and street patrols; the region spent $9.1 billion on domestic security in 2017, a 92% increase from 2016, according to local government budget data.

Spending across the country on domestic security rose 12.4% last year; in 2016, spending increased 17.6%, official data show.

The budget for domestic security covers regular and paramilitary police, courts, prosecutors and prisons. Chinese authorities are experimenting with cutting-edge tracking tools, tapping social-media accounts to punish politically incorrect speech and, in some places, trying to get residents to inform on each other using smartphone apps.

The Finance Ministry stopped including the domestic-security budget in its annual report in 2013, after media reports highlighted its growth. This year, the number appeared only as a percentage of the total budget in a graph and wasn’t mentioned in the text. It isn’t clear why the ministry decided to publish the number again.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, shown arriving for the opening session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Monday, has moved to consolidate authority and boost the Communist Party.PHOTO: DAMIR SAGOLJ/REUTERS

The budget report was released as China’s National People’s Congress convenes in Beijing, where delegates are set to approve changes to the country’s constitution that would permit Mr. Xi to remain president indefinitely.

Premier Li Keqiang, addressing the legislature on Monday in an annual government work report, highlighted a crime crackdown called the “Peaceful China initiative,” vowing to stamp out terrorism, violent crime, pornography, gambling and other ills.

“With these steps we will safeguard national and public security,” he said.

The security escalation is particularly striking in Xinjiang, in China’s far west, where the government has armed tens of thousands of police with the latest technology. Cameras and checkpoints blanket the region’s cities and villages, and street patrols use hand-held devices to scan ID cards and smartphones.

Authorities have invested in data platforms used to identify “unsafe” members of the region’s Uighur population, and in construction of a network of detention centers.

Xinjiang’s police are also engaged in a blood-collection effort designed to further expand China’s DNA database, already the world’s largest.

Per capita security spending in Xinjiang and the Tibetan Autonomous Region to the south are comparable to the national average in the U.S., with adjustments for differences in costs for personnel and equipment, said Mr. Zenz. The U.S. spends around $520 per person on policing and other forms of law enforcement, Mr. Zenz said.

Children and police watch passing Buddhist monks during a ceremony on March 1 in China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, where authorities have invested in surveillance and policing. PHOTO: JOHANNES EISELE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Chinese officials say the increase in surveillance in Xinjiang and Tibet is necessary to snuff out separatist movements among minority groups they say are influenced by hostile forces abroad. Human-rights groups say discriminatory policies in both regions are partly to blame for ethnic strife and that the heavy security exacerbates the tension.

China’s military is also investing to develop its capabilities and this week unveiled its largest annual increase in outlay in three years—an 8.1% rise, after a 7% bump in 2017.

That pales with the ramp-up in policing at home.“Growth in China’s defense budget remains in the single digits, and broadly in line with economic conditions,” said William Choong, an Asian security specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, a global affairs think tank.“A one-percentage-point increase isn’t much to shout about.”

In China, as in many other countries, actual spending on internal and external security is likely higher than official budget numbers suggest, according to Mr. Zenz and other analysts.

Chinese police in the old city of Kashgar, Xinjiang, where surveillance has escalated to monitor the local Uighur population.PHOTO: GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Ministry of Finance said in its budget report that domestic security spending would decrease slightly as a proportion of total spending this year. That is based on the budget; last year domestic security agencies went 22.9% over budget, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Neither the Ministry of Finance nor the Ministry of Public Security responded to requests for comment.

A significant portion of this year’s expenses likely came from payments for infrastructure such as new police stations and big-data platforms, said Mr. Zenz.

His research into the growing security apparatus in Xinjiang and elsewhere has included the compiling of authorities’ advertising for new police positions. In Xinjiang, around 100,000 new positions were announced in a one-year period to September 2017, and the advertising for more police continues, he said.

—Fanfan Wang
and Chun Han Wong contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications
The U.S. spends around $520 per person on policing and other forms of law enforcement, according to Adrian Zenz. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that sum to be about $570 per person. (March 6)

Early life and education

Löfven was born 21 July 1957 in Aspudden district, Stockholm. He was placed in an orphanage 10 months after his birth. Löfven was later looked after by a foster family from Sunnersta, Sollefteå. According to the agreement with this family, his birth mother would regain custody of him when she was able to; however, this did not happen. After meeting his brother, Stefan found out that his last name is Löfven, (spelled as Löfvén, in the Swedish population register).[4]

His foster father Ture Melander (1926–2003) was a lumberjack and then a factory worker, while his foster mother, Iris Melander (1929– ), worked as a health visitor.[5] He studied at Sollefteå High School before going on a welding course for 48 weeks at AMU in Kramfors. Löfven studied social work at Umeå University, but dropped out after a year and a half.[4]

Trade unionist

After completing his compulsory military service in the Swedish Air Force at the F 4 Frösön airbase 1976-77, Löfven began his career in 1978 as a welder at Hägglunds in Örnsköldsvik. Two years later he was chosen as the group’s union representative, and went on to hold a succession of union posts. In 1995 he started as an employed ombudsman in the Swedish Metalworkers’ Union, working in the areas of contract negotiations and international affairs. In 2001 he was elected vice-chairman of the Metalworkers’ Union, and in November 2005 was elected as the first chairman of the newly formed trade unionIF Metall.[2]

Political career

Stefan Löfven elected to become the party’s new leader on 27 January 2012.

Leader of the Social Democrats

In January 2012, following the resignation of Håkan Juholt, it was reported that Löfven was being considered as his successor. On 26 January 2012 the executive board nominated Löfven to become the party’s new leader[6][7][8] On 27 January 2012, Löfven was elected Leader in a party-room ballot.[9][10] Löfven was confirmed as party leader at the party’s bi-annual congress on 4 April 2013.[11]

Löfven has also expressed a desire for bipartisan agreement between the Government and the opposition Alliance parties and together they have marked three areas where enhanced cooperation will be initiated. The three areas are the pension system, future energy development, and security and defence policy.

According to Riksdag practice the parties support their own budget and if the budget falls they abstains from voting. However, on 2 December 2014, the far-right Sweden Democrats announced that, after their own budget fell in the first voting round, they would support the Alliance parties’ budget in the second voting round, thus giving that budget a majority in the Riksdag.

On 3 December 2014, the Government’s budget was voted down by the Alliance parties and the Sweden Democrats and as a consequence, Löfven announced that he would call for a fresh election to be held on 22 March 2015.[15]

On 22 December 2014, sources within the Riksdag leaked information that the Government was negotiating with the Alliance parties (Moderate Party, Centre Party, Liberal People’s Party and the Christian Democrats) to find a solution and to avoid a fresh election.[16] On 27 December 2014, the Government and the Alliance parties held a joint press conference where they announced that the six major parties had reached an agreement designed to ensure that minority governments would be able to get their own budget through the Riksdag. The agreement, dubbed “Decemberöverenskommelsen” (December Agreement), was called historical by Löfven and will be in force until the 2022 general election, regardless of the results of the next general election due to be held in 2018.[17][not in citation given]Subsequently, Löfven announced that he no longer intended to call a snap election.[18] The centre-right Alliance withdrew from the agreements in 2015, but allowed the minority government to continue governing.

2015 European migrant crisis

In 2015, when a rising number of refugees and migrants[19] began to make the journey to the European Union to seek asylum, Europe was hit by a migrant crisis and Sweden allowed over 150,000 refugees to cross borders into the country in 2015.

2017 National Security crisis

In July 2017, it became known to the public that Maria Ågren, a former Director-General of the Swedish Transport Agency, had been investigated after having cleared confidential information threatening the security of the country. The act was made in connection with a procurement of IT services with a non-governmental company in 2015. Among the cleared data were wanted vehicles, armored vehicles, the entire Swedish vehicles register, Swedish company secrets, the Swedish police criminal record- and suspicion registers, the Swedish state’s internal security system and information about agents within the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service.[25]

Several days after it first became public, Löfven held a press conference on 24 July 2017 where he said that “there’s been an accident at the Transport Agency”.[26] Responsible cabinet ministerAnna Johansson said she had been aware of the situation since January 2017 and blamed her former state secretary Erik Bromander for not having informed her earlier.[27] Cabinet ministers Anders Ygeman and Peter Hultqvist were reported to have been aware of the situation since the beginning of 2016, but chose not to inform the head of government.[28]

All parties within the Swedish opposition have opened up for a vote of confidence against cabinet ministersAnna Johansson, Anders Ygeman and Peter Hultqvist in order to remove them from office, with some parties calling for vote of confidence against Löfven as Prime Minister. Such a vote would, if supported by several parties, result in a removal of the Löfven cabinet.[29] In a press conference on 27 July Löfven announced a government reshuffling with Ygeman and Johansson resigning. He also stated that he would not resign himself over the incident.

Same-sex marriage

Foreign policy

Foreign trips made by Stefan Löfven as Prime Minister (as of 3 January 2015)

In his Policy Statement, introduced to the Riksdag on 3 October 2014, Löfven said that his Government would recognize the State of Palestine. On 30 October 2014 the Government, through Minister for Foreign AffairsMargot Wallström, announced that the Government had decided to officially recognize the State of Palestine and explained the recognition by saying that it is the only solution to get to a two-state solution between Israel and the State of Palestine. Sweden is the first country within the European Union to do so after gaining membership (with other members, such as Poland, withholding recognition previously issued under Communist rule).[33] Israel called the move unconsidered and Israel recalled its ambassador, Isaac Bachman, following the recognition. Bachman returned to Sweden on 29 November 2014.[34] In December 2015 Löfven caused an outrage in Israel by claiming that stabbing attacks are not considered terrorism by international standards. Later he reiterated himself, explaining that it is now known that the stabbing attacks are sanctioned by some terror organisations.[35]

Cohn was considered one of the most influential voices in the Trump administration.[6] On March 6, 2018, it was reported that Cohn planned to resign his position in the coming weeks.[7]

Early life

Gary Cohn was born to an Eastern European Jewish family,[8][9] the son of Victor and Ellen Cohn;[10] and was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His father was an electrician who later became a real estate developer.[11] Cohn was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age and attended four schools by the time he reached the sixth grade.[12] Cohn studied at Gilmour Academy, and attended American University‘s Kogod School of Business between Fall 1979 and Spring 1982, graduating on 16 May 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a major in Finance, Real Estate and Urban Development.

Goldman Sachs

Cohn was recruited by Goldman Sachs in 1990.[15] In 1996, he was named head of the commodities department and in 2002, he was named the head of the entire Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) division. In 2003, he was named co-head of Equities and in January 2004, Cohn was named the co-head of global securities businesses.[16] He became President and Co-Chief Operating Officer and director in June 2006.[17]

In late 2009, Cohn led a delegation from Goldman Sachs to meetings with the government of Greece, which included proposals (that were not adopted) to push debt-due dates far into the future, “much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.”[18] Goldman Sachs had been scrutinized for creating or pitching products used by Greece to “obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels”.[18]

Cohn at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2010

In 2010, Cohn testified to Congress on the role of Goldman Sachs in the financial crisis of 2007–2008.[19] Cohn testified: “During the two years of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in its residential mortgage-related business. We did not ‘bet against our clients,’ and the numbers underscore this fact.”[20]

Compensation

Cohn’s salary at Goldman Sachs was US$22 million in 2014.[21] He received $21 million in 2015.[22]

He received a severance package worth around $285 million – mostly in stock – from Goldman Sachs upon leaving to join the administration of Donald Trump.[23] In the administration he took a salary of $30,000, considerably less than every other high ranking administration official.[24][25][26]

National Economic Council director

On January 20, 2017 Cohn took office as Director of the National Economic Council (NEC) in President Donald Trump‘s administration, a position which did not require Congressional confirmation. By February 11, 2017, The Wall Street Journal described Cohn as an “economic-policy powerhouse”[27][28] and The New York Times called him Trump’s “go-to figure on matters related to jobs, business and growth”.[29] With the confirmation of Trump’s December 12, 2016 nominee for Secretary of Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, being held back by Congressional hearings, Cohn filled in the “personnel vacuum” and pushed “ahead on taxes, infrastructure, financial regulation and replacing health-care law”.[27]Had Cohn stayed at Goldman Sachs, some believed he would have become CEO when Lloyd Blankfein vacated that office.[27] His severance package at Goldman Sachs amounted to $285 million.[23] Additionally, Cohn sold a stake valued at $16 million in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank as of 2017.[30]

Cohn supports reinstating the Glass-Steagall legislation, which would separate commercial and investment banking.[31][32]

Cohn withstood pressure to resign from his job following President Trump’s speech blaming both sides for violence between white supremacists and groups such as ANTIFA protesting against them during the 2017 Charlottesville rally (Cohn was standing right behind President Trump as he made his controversial statement). He did not resign.[35]

Personality and work style

Critics of Cohn attribute to him an arrogant, aggressive, abrasive and risk-prone work style. They see his “6-foot 3-inch & 220lbs” as intimidating, as he might “sometimes hike up one leg, plant his foot on a trader’s desk, his thigh close to the employee’s face and ask how markets were doing.”[15] According to former Bear Stearns Asset Management CEO Richard Marin, Cohn’s arrogance is at the root of the problem. “When you become arrogant, in a trading sense, you begin to think that everybody’s a counterparty, not a customer, not a client.”[15]

Cohn’s supporters see these qualities as advantages. Michael Ovitz, co-founder and former chairman of Creative Artists Agency and former president of The Walt Disney Company, stated that he is impressed with Cohn. Ovitz said: “He’s a trader. He has that whole feel in his body and brain and fingertips.”[15] Ovitz sees Cohn’s toughness as a “positive” value, explaining that a high-ranking executive can’t be “all peaches and cream.”[11][15]

Donna Redel, who was Chairman of the Board of the New York Mercantile Exchange when Cohn worked there as a silver trader, remembers Cohn as “firm,” “strategic” and “driven.” Martin Greenberg, her predecessor, said Cohn “was tough,” and added that “Gary got in with the right people, worked his ass off and used his head.”[15]

In 2009, the Hillel International building at Kent State University was named the Cohn Jewish Student Center in recognition of a gift from Cohn and his wife.[40] It is the first Hillel building built directly on the campus of a state university.[41]

Cohn has been a supporter of Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities and has supported Harlem RBI since 2011. At that time, Harlem RBI was given the chance to build its own charter school. Mark Teixeira of the New York Yankees and Harlem RBI director Rich Berlin asked Cohn if he could help them raise the capital they needed to build the school.[42]

On June 17, 2013, Cohn was honored at the annual “Bid for Kids” gala in order to raise funds for Harlem RBI and the DREAM charter school. Cohn said in an interview that Harlem RBI is a project that is “very near and dear to his heart.”[42]

The former Goldman Sachs president and free trade advocate Cohn, whose departure date will come in a few weeks, decided to quit after Trump announced he would impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

In a prepared statement, Cohn said, “It has been an honor to serve my country and enact pro-growth economic policies to benefit the American people, in particular the passage of historic tax reform.”

“I am grateful to the President for giving me this opportunity and wish him and the Administration great success in the future,” Cohn said.

In his own statement, Trump said, “Gary has been my chief economic advisor and did a superb job in driving our agenda, helping to deliver historic tax cuts and reforms and unleashing the American economy once again.

“He is a rare talent, and I thank him for his dedicated service to the American people.”

Cohn clashed with Trump’s protectionist advisors on the issue of tariffs.

At a meeting with steel and aluminum executives last Thursday where Trump announced the move, Cohn argued against it, warning about price increases for steel and aluminum products, according to a person in the room.

An Axios reporter Thursday reported via Twitter that last Thursday Trump canceled a meeting that Cohn arranged for him with companies that use steel and aluminum in their products, in an effort to dissuade the president from imposing the tariffs.

Market watchers saw Cohn’s potential departure as a bad omen for the White House’s economic policy. He helped to shepherd massive tax cuts, the Trump administration’s only major legislative achievement, which the president signed into law in December.

Cohn also faced pressure to step down following Trump’s defiant response to violence at a white nationalist rally in August. In an FT interview published that month, Cohn said he faced pressure both to leave Trump’s White House and to stay in it. He even drafted a resignation letter, according to The New York Times.

The economic advisor told the FT that the White House “must do better” following Trump’s widely criticized response to violence at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the K.K.K.,” Cohn told the FT. “I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”

Cohn was Goldman’s no. 2 executive when Trump named him as his top economic advisor. Trump offered the former Goldman Sachs president the key economic post on Dec. 9, despite bashing the firm during the 2016 campaign. Cohn also had been seen as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Story 1: Trump Declares Trade War With Huge Tax/Tariff Increase on Steel and Aluminum Imports — Government Intervention or Meddling Is Not The Answer — Currency Wars Lead To Trade Wars Lead To Real Wars — Competition and Consumer Sovereignty Is The Answer — Big Government Interventionist Trump The New Hoover/Roosevelt/Nixon Progressive Interventionist and Big Spender — Decline and Fall of The American Empire — QT — Quantitative Tightening and Inflation — Videos

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In response, several Republicans painted Trump’s announcement as a grave mistake.

“Let’s be clear: The President is proposing a massive tax increase on American families,” Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said in a statement. “Protectionism is weak, not strong. You’d expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a key figure in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement who supports free-trade policies, also urged Trump to reconsider.

“Tariffs on steel and aluminum are a tax hike the American people don’t need and can’t afford,” Hatch said in a statement. “I encourage the president to carefully consider all of the implications of raising the cost of steel and aluminum on American manufacturers and consumers.”

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the second-highest-ranking member of the Republican Senate leadership, told Business Insider that the move was coming from a good place but could lead to negative outcomes such as a trade war.

“Obviously we don’t want to be taken advantage of by our trading partners, but then there is always a danger of retaliation and creating trade wars,” Cornyn said. “So it’s a very delicate balance.”

Cornyn also said that while senators knew the decision was “imminent,” the announcement on Thursday was unexpected.

Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the head of the agriculture committee, told CNN that the move would be likely to lead to retaliation against American farmers.

“Every time you do this, you get a retaliation, and agriculture is the No. 1 target,” Roberts said. “I think this is terribly counterproductive for the ag economy, and I’m not very happy.”

In addition to lawmakers, conservative action groups joined the pile-on. Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks, said the decision could reverse economic gains from the new GOP tax law.

“The Trump administration would mar its otherwise strong economic record by imposing these tariffs,” Brandon said in a statement. “These could be a lethal blow to all the economic success this administration has ushered in. Higher costs to producers and distributors of goods always get passed on to us, the consumers.”

There’s never a good time for a trade war, but for Canada the announcement of possible tariffs on steel and aluminum imports comes at a particularly difficult moment for the country.

The Great White North is currently engaged in what’s become a bitter battle over NAFTA’s future, and it was announced Friday that its GDP grew at 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter, much slower than the 4 percent it was growing at previously. Its stock market is down about 5 percent year-to-date and was flat over the last 12 months.

“Canada seems to get kicked when they’re down,” said Barry Schwartz, vice president and chief investment officer at Baskin Financial Services, a Toronto-based wealth management firm. “We’re dealing with so many things at the same time, and Canada hasn’t even done anything wrong.”

The hit on Canada’s economy

Imports on tariffs could hit the country particularly hard. Canadaexports nearly 90 percent of its steel to the United States, while it accounts for 16 percent of all U.S. steel imports, the most out of any country. It also accounts for 41 percent of America’s aluminum imports. Trump’s main target in this, China, barely exports any steel to the United States, with America ranking 26th as a destination for Chinese steel imports, according to the International Trade Administration.

While there aren’t publicly listed steel and aluminum companies in Canada of any significance anymore — they were all bought in the mid-2000s by larger international concerns when demand for commodities from China was soaring — putting a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum should make goods in other sectors, such as auto, defense and aerospace, more expensive to produce and pricier to buy. If that happens, then people and companies may spend less in other areas, which could then impact a number of sectors.

“Resources will be shifted toward these two sectors and away from everything else,” said John Curtis, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and the founding chief economist at what used to be Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. “That means people will have to pay more, so they’ll buy less of everything else in the economy.”

Where a steel tariff might have the most impact, though, is on Canada and America’s interconnected supply chain, of which many companies big and small are a part of, Curtis said. For instance, cars assembled in Canada have parts made in the United States and vice versa. Cars are often being shipped back and forth between the two countries until final assembly.

“Parts move back and forth until it might finally get made in Canada,” said Patrick Leblond, a senior fellow the Ottawa’s Centre For International Governance Innovation. “Then that car will get exported back to the U.S. Is there going to be tax every time that happens?”

Trade war worries

Steel and aluminum tariffs should be worrisome for companies and investors alike, but the big question that everyone has on their minds now is, what does this mean for NAFTA?

That question likely won’t be answered anytime soon. In a tweet Monday morning, Trump called out Canada: “We have large trade deficits with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA, which is under renegotiation right now, has been a bad deal for U.S.A. Massive relocation of companies & jobs. Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed. Also, Canada must treat our farmers much better.”

Threatening to remove tariffs only if the administration gets what it thinks is a good deal from NAFTA surely won’t go over well with Canada and Mexico. (And the United States has a trade surplus with Canada, not a deficit, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.)

Still, Leblond doesn’t think these tariffs will impact discussions, as negotiators likely are focused more on technical and legal issues right now than steel. Also, when the U.S. slapped a 20.8 percent tariff on Canadian lumber producers for softwood lumber imports, NAFTA talkskept going. (Canada did take its fight with the United States to the World Trade Organization, though.)

However, it certainly doesn’t help things, Curtis said, and could make negotiations much more awkward and tense. Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, who is part of the negotiating team, said sternly that these tariffs were “absolutely unacceptable” and that Canada is prepared to “take responsive measures to defend its trade interests and workers.”

Some market analysts do foresee a grave threat to NAFTA in Trump’s tariff move. But if Canada and other countries do indeed retaliate with tariffs of their own and a trade war begins in earnest, then whether NAFTA stays or goes could ultimately be of lesser importance. It could upend global trade as we know it, Leblond said. He’s particularly concerned about Trump using a national security excuse to impose tariffs.

Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets, said it’s a double-edged sword in terms of the NAFTA negotiations. Unless Canada gains an exemption, a war of words and actions on trade isn’t a helpful backdrop for reasoned negotiations. But it also helps satisfy Trump’s protectionist voting bloc, perhaps easing the pressure on the White House to take a hard line on the NAFTA deal.

These sorts of disputes underscore why Canada believes that the appeal process under NAFTA is a critical piece of the puzzle. The Trump administration wants a deal that excludes that provision, but without it Canada can face spurious rulings against its exports even with a “free trade” agreement in force, Shenfeld said. “The latest claim, that U.S. national security is imperiled by the use of Canadian steel or aluminum in U.S. manufacturing, seems baseless, considering that Canada has been America’s steadfast ally,” he said.

“If everyone can now say we’re going to impose tariffs because we need to protect what’s important and use national security as a justification, then everyone will lose,” Leblond said. “[Canada] could put a ban on California wine; China could impose constraints on intellectual property rights or innovation. The fear is that it will undermine the WTO process, and for what? To protect a small portion of U.S. manufacturing jobs?”

Sagging stocks

While things could change between now and April 11, when Trump will decide whether to impose the steel tariff, and April 19, when he must make a decision on aluminum tariffs, stocks have taken a hit from the announcement.

The S&P/TSX Composite Index representing Canadian stocks hasn’t been hit as hard as the S&P 500 — the market is almost flat now since the announcement — but some companies have seen their share prices decline more significantly. Global auto parts supplier Magna, for example, is down 3.9 percent and shares of aerospace giant Bombardier fell by nearly 6 percent when the markets opened Friday but have regained some ground since.

Jeff Mills, managing director and co-chief investment strategist at Pittsburgh-based PNC Asset Management Group, isn’t surprised that stocks in the United States and elsewhere are selling off post-announcement, though U.S. stock did rebound on Friday afternoon.

“The policy change will very likely increase costs for all consumers, which means it will serve to reduce some of the benefit of the recently passed tax bill,” he said. “Markets are now worried about countermeasures from other countries, and investors are starting to wonder what other protectionist measures Trump could take.”

Baskin Financial’s Schwartz doesn’t think the Canadian stock market will take that much of a hit over these tariffs specially — the S&P/TSX is already underperforming other markets – but if a trade war heats up then stocks in Canada and around the globe will see big declines.

“Who knows what will happen, but I presume the direction would be negative,” he said. “The price of goods for everything around the world would go up, inflation would rise, and while companies ultimately adjust to inflation, stocks will be negative while that adjustment period happens.”

Global investors can’t do much now, added Mills, as the exact details are still largely unknown, though he does think, generally, people should be making sure they’re comfortable with the risk they’re taking in their portfolios. Any investors interested in Canada, though, should hope that Trump, at the very least, makes the country tariff-exempt.

“Canada is probably the most penalized as things stand today,” Mills said. “Perhaps cooler heads prevail over the weekend and the tariffs end up being less broad-based.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump struck a defiant tone on Friday, saying trade wars were good and easy to win, after his plan to put tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum triggered threats of retaliation from trading partners and a slide in stock markets.

The European Union raised the possibility of taking countermeasures, France said the duties would be unacceptable and China urged Trump to show restraint. Canada, the biggest supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States, said it would retaliate if hit by U.S. tariffs.

U.S. stock indexes recouped some losses on Friday, but were on track to end the week in the red as investors fretted over a possible global trade war. World equity markets slid further and the U.S. dollar dropped to its lowest point in more than two years against the yen.

Trump said on Thursday that a plan for tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum products would be formally announced next week.

“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump said on Twitter on Friday.

In a later social media post, Trump said his aim was to protect U.S. jobs in the face of cheaper foreign products.

“We must protect our country and our workers. Our steel industry is in bad shape. IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!” he wrote.

Many economists say that instead of increasing employment, price increases for consumers of steel and aluminum such as the auto and oil industries will destroy more U.S. jobs than they create.

RETALIATION LIKELY

Major U.S. trade partners are likely to hit back.

Europe has drawn up a list of U.S. products on which to apply tariffs if Trump follows through on his plan.

“We will put tariffs on Harley-Davidson, on bourbon and on blue jeans – Levi’s,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told German television.

Trump’s threats to unleash a trade war over steel crushed any hopes of substantial progress in current talks with Canada and Mexico to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said any U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports would be“absolutely unacceptable” and vowed to continue to engage with U.S. officials on the issue.

The International Monetary Fund also expressed concern about the proposed tariffs and said they likely would damage the U.S. economy as well as the economies of other nations.

Trump’s announcement came after what one person with direct knowledge of the discussions described as a night of“chaos” in the White House due to frequent switching of positions in the administration.

While Trump often lays out stark policy positions which he later rolls back as part of a negotiating tactic, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the levels of the planned tariffs were not expected to change.

Capital Alpha Partners, a policy research group in Washington, said a quick reversal by Trump was highly unlikely.

“We also don’t see a chance for fine tuning, exceptions, carve outs, or a country-by-country policy” in the short term, the group said in a research note.“We would be hopeful that the policy could be modified in time.”

The United States is the world’s biggest steel importer, buying 35.6 million tonnes in 2017.

Peter Navarro, a White House adviser with largely protectionist views on trade, brushed off the negative effects of tariffs on U.S. industry.

He said a 10 percent tariff on aluminum would add one cent to the cost of a can of beer, $45 to a car and $20,000 to a Boeing 727 Dreamliner.“Big price effects? Negligible price effects,” he told Fox News.

But home appliance maker Electrolux (ELUXb.ST) said it was delaying a $250 million expansion of its plant in Tennessee as it was worried U.S. steel prices would rise and make manufacturing there less competitive.

Trump’s administration has imposed a series of trade duties on a range of goods from solar panels to washing machines.

It is even studying whether America’s rubber band makers need protection as he seeks to boost domestic manufacturing and employment. The decision on steel and aluminum was the most wide ranging and provocative to date and there is the prospect of more to come, with the government holding an investigation into alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property by China.

The EU, which sees itself as a global counterweight to a protectionist-leaning Trump, made no mention of retaliation but spoke of countermeasures that conform with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.

Safeguard measures, last deployed by Europe in 2002 after then-U.S. President George W. Bush imposed steel import duties, would be designed to guard against steel and aluminum being diverted to Europe from elsewhere if U.S. tariffs come in.

But to conform with WTO rules such measures would have to apply to imports from all countries and could also hit producers including China, India, Russia, South Korea and Turkey.

“If the president wants to protect good-paying, family-supporting jobs in America, especially here in Wisconsin, then he should reconsider the administration’s position on these tariffs, particularly on ultra-thin aluminum,” Walker said in a statement.

China, which Trump frequently accuses of unfair trade practices, called for restraint from the United States.

“China urges the United States to show restraint in using protective trade measures, respect multilateral trade rules, and make a positive contribution to international trade order,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.

Although China accounts for only 2 percent of U.S. steel imports, its massive industry expansion has helped produce a global steel glut that has driven down prices.

Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook in Sydney, Tom Daly in Beijing, Philip Blenkinsop and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels, Doina Chiacu, Eric Walsh and Makini Brice in Washington, and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; Writing by David Clarke and Alistair Bell; Editing by Paul Simao and James Dalgleish

The White House’s war over steel tariffs, explained

The move sparked an internal feud at the White House. Then the stock market plunged.

The Trump administration may have finally launched the trade war many expected was coming.

President Trump announced plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on all steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports — a move that will likely anger US trading partners and American businesses that buy steel. Wall Street panned the move, with the Dow falling more than 500 points in the hours after Trump’s statement.

The announcement came amida fierce fight within the White House over the proposed tariffs, according to CNBC. News reports Thursday morning said that Trump would disclose the new policy later in the day. Then the announcement was reportedly postponed. Finally, at a White House meeting with steel executives, Trump said that the tariffs would indeed be implemented. “We’ll be signing it next week,” he told the group, according to a pool report. “And you’ll have protection for a long time in a while.”

In the end, the trade hawks won. The Commerce Department will impose the tariffs under a rarely used law that allows emergency trade sanctions for “national security.”

Protecting the US steel industry from foreign competition has been a top priority for Trump’s trade team since day one. They’ve framed the issue as a fight to preserve jobs for American steelworkers, who have seen their jobs disappear as a result of automation and globalization.

Coincidentally (or not), Trump’s trade team has deep ties to the US steel industry, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross made his fortune investing in distressed steel companies. (It’s also worth noting, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias points out, that the Metals Service Center Institute, a trade group that favors anti-import measures, held last year’s annual conference at the Trump Doral resort in Miami.)

What you need to know about the Trump steel tariffs US president chooses the most drastic option available to him Share on Twitter (opens new window)

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Shawn Donnan in Washington YESTERDAY

Donald Trump has said he will impose new tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium, fuelling fears that the US is about to start a trade war with China and other major trading partners.

The move triggered a sharp sell-off in financial markets, and prompted complaints from across the broader business community that US companies would be hit by higher prices.

Here are five things you need to know.

Mr Trump has chosen the most drastic option available The president said he would sign an order announcing 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports and 10 per cent tariffs on aluminium imports. The announcement followed investigations that Mr Trump ordered last year into whether a surge in imports undermined the US’s ability to source the steel and aluminium it needs to build military equipment such as tanks and warships, as well as the nation’s broader economic security. Last month, the commerce department recommended three separate options for each metal: a global tariff, tariffs targeted at China and other key countries mixed with quotas, and a universal quota. Mr Trump opted for the global tariff option, potentially subjecting imports from all countries to the hefty levy. Question is whether this makes sense economically The US steel and aluminium industries argue that they have faced an existential assault for more than a decade from China, which has become the world’s largest producer of both metals and has flooded global markets with cheap products. The tariffs are intended to restrict imports and allow the US steel and aluminium industries to increase production and use idle capacity, as well as rehire workers. But history shows that imposing tariffs to protect one industry often results in pain for another. According to industry groups, about 6.5m people are employed in the US in businesses that use steel and aluminium. After President George W Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports in 2002, a study found that the move had cost the US about 200,000 jobs. As a result, many Republicans see tariffs as a mistake, and worry that such a broad move will undermine other efforts such as tax reform intended to boost economic growth. “The president is right to target unfair trade, but blanket tariffs that sweep up fairly traded steel and aluminium can backfire and harm our businesses and workers,” said Kevin Brady, the Republican congressman who chairs the House ways and means committee. China is unlikely to suffer the consequences The US aluminium and steel industries have long been clamouring for protection from what they claim is unfair competition from China. But following a series of product and country-specific tariffs introduced in recent years, China now accounts for very little of the steel or aluminium imported into the US. Instead, the leading source for the US of both metals is Canada. Other major Nato members such as Germany are also major exporters of steel to the US. Many trade experts expect there will be a process for countries and companies to apply to be exempted from the tariffs. For example, Canada has long been considered part of the US national security industrial base, which, lawyers say, means it has a strong case to be exempted. Mexico could also apply for an exception given its membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement, although that pact is now being renegotiated. But such a process is also likely to lead to furious lobbying of the president by companies who will have to seek to curry favour with the administration, said Phil Levy, a former trade adviser to Mr Bush. “It is just about the polar opposite of draining the swamp,” Mr Levy said. China and the EU are likely to retaliate EU officials have made clear that they are prepared to retaliate against any US move to impose tariffs and challenge them in the World Trade Organization.

EU member states have already begun discussing possible targets for retaliation. In the EU’s line of fire are likely to be politically sensitive products such as Kentucky Bourbon — from top Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s home state — and cheese from Wisconsin, the home of House Speaker Paul Ryan. Wendy Cutler, a former senior US trade official who heads the Asia Society Policy Institute, said China would also likely respond with “quick and proportional” trade measures.

Ending a longstanding ceasefire in the global trading system Ever since it was established following the second world war, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade has included a loophole that allows countries to invoke “national security” to impose tariffs and other trade barriers in the event of war or other national threats. But the US and other countries have studiously stayed away from using that loophole for decades, for fear that doing so would lead others to do the same. By invoking national security in the steel and aluminium tariffs, Mr Trump is throwing out that decades-old gentleman’s agreement. Part of the problem is that the president has made his disdain for the WTO clear.

If the US is challenged at the WTO and a panel finds that Washington wrongly invoked national security, Mr Trump — if he is still president — could decide to ignore the finding, or even pull the US out of the body altogether. Others worry that it could also have the long-feared “domino effect”, with countries such as China using national security as an excuse for their own trade measures.

“This will either close the door on being able to self-define ‘national security’ or open the door on being able to block imports simply by waving the ‘national security’ flag,” said John Veroneau, who served as a senior trade official in the administration of Mr Bush and is now at law firm Covington & Burling.

Elsewhere, the proposed tariffs are unlikely to sway US monetary policy in the short term given the direct impact on America’s $19tn economy is likely to be modest.

Even if import prices are lifted by the amount of the tariff it would add a modest 5 basis points of price pressure – which may or many not be passed onto consumer prices, according to JP Morgan calculations. If the Trump administration’s approach, however, triggers retaliation and escalates into a broader trade war, the consequences would be more serious, adding to inflationary pressures in the US while damaging growth and complicating the policy outlook.

Trump Repeats Nixon’s Folly

DAVID FRUM MAR 2, 2018

This president isn’t the first to embrace a “trade war” to bolster his populist credentials—but in the end, it’s ordinary people who will bear its cost.

President Trump just raised the price of cars, beer, vacations, and apartment rentals.

That’s not what most headlines say. Those headlines say that Trump will raise tariffs on steel and aluminum. Higher tariffs mean higher prices for those inputs—and therefore for the products ultimately made from those outputs. Automotive and construction top the largest users of steel in the United States. Aluminum is heavily used to make airplanes, cars and trucks, and beverage containers, and also in construction.

The last time the U.S. imposed steel tariffs, back in 2002, the project was abandoned after 20 months. A 2003 report commissioned by industries that consumed steel estimated that the Bush steel tariffs cost in excess of 200,000 jobs—or more than the total number of people then employed in the entire steel industry at the time.

But Trump wanted tariffs, and tariffs he has got. Even by Trump standards, the decision-making process was chaos. As late as 9 p.m. last night, it remained undecided whether there would be an announcement today at all—never mind what that announcement would be. Key congressional committee chairs were unconsulted and uninformed.

The usual rules of trade policy were ignored. For authority, Trump invoked a trade law premised on protecting war-essential industries. Yet this authority is plainly a pretext. The Department of Defense intervention in the debate shredded the logic of protectionists like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, himself a former steel man.

U.S. military requirements for steel and aluminum each only represent about 3 percent of U.S. production. Therefore, DoD does not believe that the findings in the reports [of harm to domestic steel and aluminum producers from foreign competition] impact the ability of DoD programs to acquire the steel or aluminum necessary to meet national defense requirements.

What did alarm the Department of Defense about proposed steel and aluminum tariffs was potential harm to vital U.S. alliances. China does not rank among the top 10 steel exporters to the United States. That list is topped by Canada, followed by Brazil. In third place is South Korea, an indispensable ally in the preemptive war the Trump administration is now contemplating against North Korea.

Canada also heads the list of aluminum exporters. For that reason, DoD pleaded for even more caution with regard to aluminum tariffs than steel. “[If] the Administration takes action on steel, DoD recommends waiting before taking further steps on aluminum.”

Trump announced simultaneous action on both—without itemizing which countries would be subject to the tariffs, and which exempt. Trump’s unpredictability and threatening language have not only jolted U.S. financial markets, but have done further damage to the U.S.-led alliance system. European Union trade ministers agreed earlier this week to retaliate if the U.S. imposes steel tariffs, further degrading a U.S.-EU relationship already badly damaged by Trump’s hostility to NATO and deference to Russia.

Donald Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon in his disdain for law and ethics. The parallel applies to economics too. Nixon in 1971 quit the Bretton Woods agreement and imposed a surtax on all imports. The “shock” disrupted the world economy and profoundly angered formerly trusting friends already uneasy over the war in Vietnam. But Nixon, who knew little and cared less about economics, had his eye fixed on one concern only: the 1972 election. His emergency economic measures—joined to a loosening of monetary policy and a big increase in Social Security payouts the next year—were selected with an eye to one concern only. In the words of Allen Matusow, the shrewdest student of Nixon’s economic policy, “Somehow he had to make the economy hum by 1972 or face likely defeat in his quest for reelection.” What that meant in practice, Matsuow wrote, was that Nixon governed not according to what would work in the long term, but according to “the prevailing mood of the two-thirds of the country he called the ‘constituency of uneducated people.’”

Nixon did indeed win in 1972. He also bequeathed his country not only the worst political scandal in its history to date, but a decade of stagflation that bore most heavily upon the very people Nixon claimed to champion. We’ve been there before; it looks like we’re returning there again.

Navarro is known as a staunch critic of China and strong proponent of reducing U.S. trade deficits. He has accused Germany and China of currency manipulation. He has called for increasing the size of the American manufacturing sector, setting high tariffs, and repatriating global supply chains. He is also a strong opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. His views on trade are widely considered unorthodox by other economists.

Early life and education

Navarro was born on July 15, 1949. Navarro’s father, a saxophonist and clarinetist, led a house band, which played summers in New Hampshire and winters in Florida.[2] His parents divorced when he was 9 or 10.[2]Subsequently, he lived with his mother, a Saks Fifth Avenue secretary, in Palm Beach, Florida.[2] He lived in Bethesda, Maryland, during his teenage years.[2]

Academics

A professor of economics and public policy at University of California, Irvine for over 20 years, Navarro has worked on energy issues and the relationship between the United States and Asia.[9] He has received multiple teaching awards for MBA courses he has taught.[10] Before joining the UC Irvine faculty, Navarro worked as a research associate in Harvard University’s Energy and Environmental Policy Center from 1981 to 1985.

As a doctoral student in 1984 Nararro wrote a book titled, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America, which discussed that special interest groups had led the United States to “a point in its history where it cannot grow and prosper.” In the book he also called for greater worker’s compensation by those that had lost jobs to trade and foreign competition. His doctoral thesis on why corporations donate to charity is one of his highest cited works. He has also done research in the topic of wind energy with Frank Harris, a former student of his.[11]

He then lectured at the University of California, San Diego, where he also served as an assistant professor, teaching courses in business and government.[3] Prior to teaching, Navarro worked in Washington, D.C. as an energy and environmental policy analyst.[12] Navarro has published peer-reviewed economics research on energy policy, charity, deregulation and the economics of trash collection.[8][13][14] According to the Economist, Navarro “is a prolific writer, but has no publications in top-tier academic journals.”[15]

Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action (2011) is a non-fiction book by Navarro and Greg Autry[17] that chronicles “from currency manipulation and abusive trade policies, to deadly consumer products,” the alleged threats to America’s economic dominance in the 21st century posed by China’s Communist Party. Navarro argues that China violates fair trade by “illegal export subsidies and currency manipulation, effectively flooding the U.S. markets” and unfairly making it “virtually impossible” for American companies to compete.[18] It is a critique of “global capitalism” including foreign labor practices and environmental protection.[19] Currency manipulation and subsidies are stated as reasons that “American companies cannot compete because they’re not competing with Chinese companies, they’re competing with the Chinese government.”[20] Ronnie Scheib, from Variety, says “One need not fully subscribe to Peter Navarro’s demonization to appreciate his lucid wake-up call to the imminent dangers of the huge U.S.-China trade imbalance and its disastrous impact on the American economy.”[18]

In 2016, Navarro served as a policy adviser to Donald Trump‘s 2016 presidential campaign.[1] Navarro and the international private equity investor Wilbur Ross authored an economic plan for the Donald Trump presidential campaign in September 2016.[26] Navarro was invited to be an adviser after Jared Kushner saw on Amazon that he co-wrote Death by China, while he was researching China for Trump.[27] When told that the Tax Policy Centerassessment of Trump’s economic plan would reduce federal revenues by $6 trillion and reduce economic growth in the long term, Navarro said that the analysis demonstrated “a high degree of analytical and political malfeasance”.[28] When the Peterson Institute for International Affairs estimated that Trump’s economic plan would cost millions of American their jobs, Navarro said that writers at the Peterson Institute “weave a false narrative and they come up with some phony numbers.”[29] According to MIT economist Simon Johnson, the economic plan essay authored by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Donald Trump during the campaign had projections “based on assumptions so unrealistic that they seem to have come from a different planet. If the United States really did adopt Trump’s plan, the result would be an immediate and unmitigated disaster.”[30] When 370 economists, including nineteen Nobel laureates, signed a letter warning against Donald Trump’s stated economic policies in November 2016, Navarro said that the letter was “an embarrassment to the corporate offshoring wing of the economist profession who continues to insist bad trade deals are good for America.”[31][32]

In October 2016, with Wilbur Ross and Andy Puzder, Navarro coauthored the essay titled “Economic Analysis of Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter”.[33] On December 21, 2016, Navarro was selected by President-elect Donald Trump to head a newly created position, as director of the White House National Trade Council.[34] He outlines President Trump’s trade policy as aiming to create jobs, revive the manufacturing sector, and improve the country’s trade balance. He warned that trade deficits could jeopardize U.S. national security by allowing unfriendly nations to encroach on American supply chains. One of his main missions is to focus on behaviors by other countries that he considers abusive, cheating, illegal, and unfair against the U.S.[35][36][37]

By July 2017, Politico reported that Navarro’s influence within the White House was weak.[38]Axios reported the same in November 2017.[39] By July 2017, Navarro only had two staffers, and the National Trade Council had essentially become part of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing policy.[38] By September 2017, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing policy had been folded into the National Economic Council, which meant that Navarro would have to report to NEC Director Gary Cohn.[40] However, in February 2018, several media outlets reported that Navarro’s influence in the administration was rising again and that he would likely be promoted shortly.[41][42]Josh Rogin, writing for The Washington Post, reported that Navarro had used his time of lowered influence to lead several low-profile policy items, such as working to increase military funding, drafting Executive Order 13806, and leading the effort to solve a dispute between the United States and Qatar over the Open Skies Agreement between the two countries.[43]

Opinions and assessment of trade policy

Navarro has been a staunch critic of trade with China and strong proponent of reducing U.S. trade deficits. He has attacked Germany, Japan and China for currency manipulation. He has called for increasing the size of the American manufacturing sector, setting high tariffs, and repatriating global supply chains. He was a fierce opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

According to Politico, Navarro’s economic theories are “considered fringe” by his fellow economists.[44] Al-Jazeera notes that “few other economists have endorsed Navarro’s ideas.”[45] A New Yorker reporter described Navarro’s views on trade and China as so radical “that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them.”[46] The Economist described Navarro as having “oddball views”.[47] The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has praised him as “one of the most versatile and productive American economists of the last few decades”, but Cowen noted that he disagreed with his views on trade, which he claimed go “against a strong professional consensus.”[44] University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers described Navarro’s views as “far outside the mainstream,” noting that “he endorses few of the key tenets of” the economics profession.[48] According to Lee Branstetter, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon and trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Navarro “was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system … He doesn’t publish in journals. What he’s writing and saying right now has nothing to do with what he got his Harvard Ph.D. in … he doesn’t do research that would meet the scientific standards of that community.”[49] Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described a tax and trade paper written by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Trump as “a complete misunderstanding of international trade, on their part.”[28]

Border adjustment tax

Navarro supports a tax policy called “border adjustment”, which essentially taxes all imports.[49] In response to criticism that the border adjustment tax could hurt U.S. companies and put jobs at risk, Navarro called it “fake news.”[49]

Critic of China trade policy

According to Politico, “Navarro is perhaps the most extreme advocate in Washington, and maybe in all of economics, for an aggressive stance toward China.”[44] Navarro put his attention to China in the mid-2000s.[6] His first publication on the subject is the 2006 book The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won.[50] Navarro has said that he started to examine China when he noticed that his former students were losing jobs, concluding that China was at fault.[6]

In Politico‘s description of the book, “Navarro uses military language to refer to China’s trade policies, referring to its ‘conquest’ of the world’s export markets, which has ‘vaporized literally millions of manufacturing jobs and driven down wages.’ … China’s aspirations are so insatiable, he claims, that eventually there will be a clash over “our most basic of all needs—bread, water, and air.'”[50] Navarro has described the entry of China to the World Trade Organization as one of the United States’ biggest mistakes.[6] To respond to the Chinese threat, Navarro has advocated for 43% tariffs, the repudiation of trade pacts, major increases in military expenditures and strengthened military ties with Taiwan.[50][6]The New York Times notes that “a wide range of economists have warned that curtailing trade with China would damage the American economy, forcing consumers to pay higher prices for goods and services.”[51]Navarro has reportedly also encouraged President Trump to enact a 25-percent tariff on Chinese steel imports, something that “trade experts worry… would upend global trade practices and cause countries to retaliate, potentially leading to a trade war”.[52]

Navarro has said that a large part of China’s competitive advantage over the United States stems from unfair trade practices.[15] Navarro has criticized China for pollution, poor labor standards, government subsidies, producing “contaminated, defective and cancerous” exports, currency manipulation, and theft of US intellectual property.[15][45][53] In his poorly received 2012 documentary, Navarro said that China caused the loss of 57,000 US factories and 25 million jobs.[45] While Navarro maintains that China manipulates its currency, neither the U.S. Treasury nor most economists believe that it is the case.[49][6]

According to Foreign Policy, “well-regarded China analysts are almost universal in their derision of [Navarro’s] views.”[6] Of the more than dozen China specialists contacted by Foreign Policy, most either did not know of him or only interacted with him briefly.[6] Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago professor of Chinese History, said that his “recollection is that [Navarro] generally avoided people who actually knew something about the country.”[6] Columnist Gordon G. Chang was the only China watcher contacted by Foreign Policywho defended Navarro, but even then noted that he disagreed with Navarro’s claims of currency manipulation, opposition to the TPP and calls for high tariffs.[6] Navarro does not appear to speak Chinese nor has he spent any time in the country.[6] James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said that Navarro’s books and documentary on China “have close to zero credibility with people who know the country,” and are filled with “hyperbole, inaccuracies” and a “cartoonish caricature of China that he puts out.”[6]

Germany

Navarro drew controversy when he accused Germany of using a “grossly undervalued” euro to “exploit” the US and its EU partners.[54]Politico noted that Germany does not set the value of the euro.[50] Economists and commentators are divided on the accuracy of Navarro’s remarks.[55][56]Paul Krugman said that Navarro was right and wrong at the same time: “Yes, Germany in effect has an undervalued currency relative to what it would have without the euro… But does this mean that the euro as a whole is undervalued against the dollar? Probably not.”[57] Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff described Navarro’s accusation of Germany as a currency manipulator as “#stupideconomics”.[58]

Manufacturing

Navarro argues that the decline in US manufacturing jobs is chiefly due to “unfair trade practices and bad trade deals. And if you don’t believe that, just go to the booming factories in Germany, in Japan, in Korea, in China, in Malaysia, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Italy—every place that we’re running deficits with.”[59] However, many economists attribute the decline in manufacturing jobs chiefly to automation and other innovations that allow manufacturing firms to produce more goods with fewer workers, rather than trade.[59][60]

Navarro has been a proponent of strengthening the manufacturing sector’s role in the national economy: “We envision a more Germany-style economy, where 20 percent of our workforce is in manufacturing. … And we’re not talking about banging tin in the back room.”[49]The New York Times notes that “experts on manufacturing … doubt that the government can significantly increase factory employment, noting that mechanization is the major reason fewer people are working in factories.”[51]

Opposition to NAFTA

Navarro has called for the United States to leave NAFTA.[52]Politico reported that Navarro tried to convince President Trump of leaving NAFTA.[52]

Repatriation of global supply chains

Navarro has called for repatriating global supply chains.[50][53] According to Politico’s Jacob Heilbrunn, such a move “would be enormously costly and take years to execute”.[50]

Trade as a national security risk

Navarro has framed trade as a national security risk.[50][61][62] According to Politico, “he’s a hard-line mercantilist who insists that military confrontation with some trading partners is almost inevitable.”[50]

Navarro has characterized foreign purchases of U.S. companies as a threat to national security, but according to NPR, this is “a fringe view that puts him at odds with the vast majority of economists.”[63] Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin noted that the US government already reviews foreign purchases of companies with military or strategic value, and has on occasion rejected such deals.[63] Irwin said that Navarro had not substantiated his claim with any evidence.[63]

Navarro has also said that the United States has “already begun to lose control of [its] food supply chain”, which according to NPR, “sounded pretty off-the-wall to a number of economists” who noted that the US is a massive exporter of food.[63] Dermot Hayes, an agribusiness economist at Iowa State University, described Navarro’s statement as “uninformed”.[63]

Trade deficits

Navarro is a proponent of the notion that trade deficits are bad in and of themselves, a view which is widely rejected by trade experts and economists across the political spectrum.[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][2][excessive citations] In a white paper co-authored with Wilbur Ross, Navarro stated, “when a country runs a trade deficit by importing more than it exports, this subtracts from growth.”[69][74] In a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending his views, Navarro stated, “If we are able to reduce our trade deficits through tough, smart negotiations, we should be able to increase our growth.”[75] Harvard University economics professor Gregory Mankiw has said that Navarro’s views on the trade deficit are based on the kind of mistakes that “even a freshman at the end of ec 10 knows.”[76][77] Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner said about Navarro’s op-ed, “as someone who’s written on this topic I could not for the life of me understand his reasoning”.[61] According to Tyler Cowen, “close to no one” in the economics profession agrees with Navarro’s idea that a trade deficit is bad in and of itself.[68] Nobel laureate Angus Deaton described Navarro’s attitude on trade deficits as “an old-fashioned mercantilist position.”[73]

Opposition to Trans-Pacific Partnership

Navarro opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[83] In an April 2015 op-ed, Navarro said, “To woo us, their spinmeisters boast the TPP will spur American exports to stimulate sorely needed economic growth. In truth, the American economy will suffer severely. This is because the TPP will hammer two main drivers of economic growth – domestic investment and ‘net exports.'”[83] Navarro said in March 2017 that TPP “would have been a “death knell” to America’s auto and vehicle parts industry that we “urgently need to bring back to full life.”[53]Politico‘s Jacob Heilbrunn and theEconomist argue that there may be a disconnect between Navarro’s policy on China and his opposition to the TPP, as scuttling the TPP will strengthen China’s hand.[50][15]

“Ballistic missiles, true to the name, go on a ballistic trajectory,” she told the site on Monday (NZ time). “They use these powerful engines to get themselves moving really fast, but after the engines burn out they’re just coasting.”

It’s not hard to figure out where a ballistic missile is going to land, she explains, so it’s not hard to shoot them out of the sky.

Russia’s new weapons evade defences in three ways. The first is by attaching nuclear warheads to cruise missiles, which don’t coast to their destination high up in the air – they fly close to the ground, out of radar’s sight.

“In theory, a cruise missile carrying a nuclear bomb could slip under American defenses and detection systems, and detonate before Americans could mobilise a response,” wrote Mr Letzter.

And being nuclear-powered, the missiles in theory have enough power to travel across the world.

Russian S-400 missile air defence systems in a military parade to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the battle of Stalingrad. Photo credit: Reuters

The second method is a new nuclear torpedo, difficult to detect before it detonates on the coast.

The third is a traditional ballistic missile with a deadly difference.

“A missile that can deploy multiple warheads, all of which enter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds – up to 20 times the speed of sound – and could perform evasive manoeuvres in flight before striking their targets,” writes Mr Letzter.

Multiple warheads bear down on Florida in an animation. Photo credit: Russia/APTN

Dr Grego said the escalation in missile technology is a partly a result of the US abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 – part of which disallowed states from building missile defence shields for this very reason.

“By building a defence, rather than discourage your adversary, your adversary is likely to just build more so that they can get up and over your defence. And then you build more defence. So it’s an arms race cycle.”

Former adviser to US Presidents and nuclear weapons expert Philip Coyle told Livescience much the same thing.

“In 2004, Putin himself warned the United States that if we kept going the way we were going, this is what he was going to do. And he did it.”

Joe Biden says he is not running for president

by Daniel Chaitin | Feb 28, 2018, 6:13 PM

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Tuesday that the Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a move condemned by President Trump on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A group of 13 Republican lawmakers have signed on to a letter asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a second special counsel to investigate concerns they have with the Justice Department and FBI.The lawmakers say this special counsel would look into agency leadership decisions to end the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server, the circumstances surrounding the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation, and allegations in a recently released House Intelligence Committee memo regarding government surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“It’s simple: We’ve learned deeply concerning information on FISA abuses, the dossier, former high-level FBI officials, and more—and it stinks to high heaven. Americans deserve the truth,” tweeted Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chair of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the signees of the letter.

Many Republicans in recent months have sounded the alarm about potential bias in the DOJ and FBI.

Exacerbating those concerns, the House Intelligence Committee memo asserted that the “Trump dossier,” which contains salacious and unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, was an “essential” part of the surveillance application to spy on Page. However, the Democratic rebuttal memo, released in redacted form over the weekend, said it “played no role” in the FBI launching its Russia probe, which is now led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Democratic memo, however, did leave some other concerns raised by the GOP memo, spearheaded by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., unanswered.

While the lawmakers who signed on to the letter say, on balance, the employees of the agencies do admirable work, a special counsel is needed to weed out the bad ones.

“We acknowledge with immense gratitude that nearly every single man and woman in the DOJ and FBI conducts themselves daily with integrity, independence, patriotism, objectivity and commitment to the rule of law,” the lawmakers wrote. “That is why this Special Counsel is of the utmost importance to ensure that these historic, legendary and necessary agencies move forward more respected and effective than ever before.”

The letter comes one day after Sessions said that his Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate the alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a move condemned by President Trump on Wednesday.

“Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse,” Trump tweeted. “Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, responded to that tweet, questioning why a FISA investigation is needed at all.

“More important question: Why is the AG asking for a FISA investigation at all? DOJ and FBI already said the Nunes memo was inaccurate, misleading and extraordinarily reckless. With no evidence of abuse, only explanation is political pressure,” Schiff

Americans should be reassured that the federal law enforcement agencies are working to keep America safer rather than focused on revenge against political enemies.

By Mollie Hemingway

JANUARY 24, 2018

It is long past time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the possibility of widespread and systematic corruption, obstruction, leaking, and collusion within America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice have made clear, through their ongoing obstruction of congressional investigations and oversight, that these agencies simply can not be trusted to investigate or police themselves.

Robert S. Mueller III was appointed as a special counsel to make sure that any investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was independent and impartial. In the same way, it is necessary for an independent special counsel to investigate alleged corruption at the FBI and Department of Justice, so the American public can once again be assured that the federal law enforcement agencies are in fact working to keep America safer rather than focused on getting revenge against political enemies.

To recap, we’ve seen the following startling developments in just the past few days:

The revelation that two key FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, sent each other more than 50,000 texts about their work, including regarding the Clinton and Russia probes. Strzok, the former deputy assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division, ran the Clinton investigation and interviewed key witnesses. He was also involved in the Russia investigation.

That five months of texts between these agents are missing. The bureau claims, in the latest of strange coincidences affecting the investigation, that a technical error resulted in a failure to capture these important texts.

The suspicious timing of the missing texts — from shortly after the election to the day that Mueller was named special counsel. These months were full of leaks from intelligence officials about the Russia probe.

That these 50,000-plus texts aren’t even all of their texts, but just those related to the ongoing Office of Inspector General investigation. The FBI and DOJ are not sharing texts that are personal or about other cases. Since the Office of Inspector General hasn’t said it’s reviewing Russia or dossier-related cases, that leaves a lot of texts yet to be disclosed and examined by investigators.

That Comey’s implausible claim to have waited until after interviewing Hillary Clinton to decide to let her off the hook for mishandling classified information is contradicted by additional available evidence.

That Attorney General Loretta Lynch only made her claim that she would defer to the FBI on prosecuting Clinton because she knew Comey would let her off, according to Page.

The existence of a four-page memo compiled by the House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence alleging surveillance abuse by the FBI against Trump affiliates.

These revelations are not wild speculation but based on concrete evidence that the FBI and DOJ fought tooth and nail against releasing.

Previous months saw startling allegations about the use of a scurrilous dossier to secure a wiretap against a Trump affiliate, the use of that dossier to brief congressional committees, the leaking of the existence of the dossier despite its lack of corroboration, statements that the FBI probe was an “insurance policy” because “we can’t take that risk” that Trump would be elected, and that the dossier itself was funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. There were also criminal leaks of top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) communications. This to say nothing of the widespread unmasking, distribution, and illegal leaking of surveillance information.

It is vital to a democratic republic that the public have faith in their law enforcement institutions. All of these developments feed the perception that there are two different law enforcement regimes — one for friends, and one for enemies. There are clear signs that Clinton benefited from a different set of rules that applied to her that didn’t apply to anyone else. There are also signs that people in federal agencies improperly used spy powers to spin up investigations and special counsels to go after political enemies.

That can’t happen.

Why A Second Special Counsel?

The current special counsel probably should have been investigating the FBI and DOJ as part of his charge into the Russia probe. Mueller has been on the case since May, and should have seen enough shortly thereafter to be concerned about various agencies’ handling of the probes.

But it also shouldn’t be surprising that he has not done much, if anything, to probe the FBI and DOJ. Mueller is the former head of the FBI and very close to Comey. Nobody can be expected to investigate his own friends and family, and asking Mueller to seriously tackle the problems that have been revealed regarding his friends at his old agency is unrealistic.

Similarly, an investigation into all these allegations can’t be done by a U.S. attorney, because it has to be removed from the oversight of those who have run the department for the last several years, since they will be the ones being investigated.

An investigation into all of these allegations can’t be done solely by Congress, either. As Rep. Trey Gowdy said this week, while Congress has a great deal of authority and ability to do general statutory oversight, it’s not an institution that is equipped or designed to do the nitty gritty of law enforcement. A proper investigation will serve warrants and be able to generate quick responses to subpoenas. Congress has been unable to get the FBI or DOJ to quickly comply with requests for information, sometimes waiting months or more for meager responses. This investigation requires an institution and person with authority, institutional expertise, and the tools necessary to get to the bottom of problems at Justice.

Schiff’s Case For a Special Counsel

Even Democrats have been making a good case for a special counsel, however inadvertently. When asked on CNN why the American public couldn’t just see the House Intelligence Committee memo alleging surveillance abuses, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Americans couldn’t handle it without knowing the underlying information that was too sensitive to release. He also suggested that public demand to see the memo, which has been high, was actually just another Russian operation. That turned out to be false.

But if it’s true that controversial information about the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe is too sensitive and could be misconstrued — so sensitive that Schiff voted to keep the rest of Congress in the dark about it and is fighting to make sure the public doesn’t see this information — that means it’s important enough to demand a special prosecutor.

The Leakers’ Case For a Special Counsel

As damaging and discrediting news about “potential corruption at highest levels” came out this week, leaks about the Mueller investigation started coming out. These included that FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly threatened to resign; that Sessions was interviewed by the Mueller probe, that Mueller is ready to interview Trump, that Russian bots are the real culprits behind public demand to see the surveillance memo, that Trump reportedly asked controversial FBI official Andrew McCabe who McCabe voted for, and various other items.

These leaks tend to happen when bad news threatens the Mueller probe. But they’re perhaps ill-advised, only suggesting all the more to the politicized nature of the current investigation. A special counsel should not be seen as a threat to the Mueller probe but as a necessary help.

An investigation into potential corruption will help preserve or restore confidence in the Mueller investigation. If the results of the Mueller investigation are to be taken seriously, these questions have to be addressed. High-ranking FBI agents are in their own words undermining the entire purpose of the Mueller investigation, such as when Strzok said there’s nothing to the Russia probe prior to joining the special counsel team. Or when he had to be kicked off the team because of how his texts pointed to corruption.

Because the Mueller investigation itself was brought about by a Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research document, which the FBI used despite it not being verified, as well as Comey’s leaks of classified information in retaliation for being fired, the entire investigation has a cloud over it. A special counsel could clear the air or provide clarity regarding the trustworthiness of the Mueller probe. A failure to investigate these charges would damage the country’s ability to have any objective investigation into abuses of power in the future.

The political and media arms of the Democratic Party attempt to downplay the scandal, but it’s only getting worse with each new piece of information that is brought to light. The American people need to know that the attorney general cares about the charges, wants to get to the bottom of the problems, and will work to restore the integrity of this important department. The criminalization of politics in this country is undermining confidence in the republic itself.

If there are good explanations for all of these strange coincidences and lapses in judgment, the American people need to be told. If there is systematic corruption, that needs to be learned as well.

A special counsel who is not part of the current club at the top of these agencies should be appointed. The individual needs to be unimpeachable and a person of integrity who has the strength to take on an incalcitrant bureaucracy and establishment. He or she should have experience in investigating and rooting out corruption in bureaucratic agencies.

Story 2: Trump Take Guns Before Due Process Comment Betrays Bill of Rights Voter Base — In Your Heart You Know He Is Nuts — Never Mind — Governments Many Failures in Parkland Florida Shootings — American People Have The Absolute Right To Defend Themselves Against Tyrants, Criminals and Nuts — Videos

Gun control measures proposed by Trump

Trump: Take the guns first, go through due process second

President Trump Meets with Bipartisan Members of Congress to Discuss School and Community Safety

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump for his proposal to take guns away from dangerous individual even if it violates constitutional rights to due process.

Trump made the remarks during a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House to discuss safety measures in the wake of last week’s mass shooting at a high school in Florida.

‘While today’s meeting made for great TV, the gun control proposals discussed would make for bad policy that would not keep our children safe,’ NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said in a statement to The Hill.

‘Instead of punishing law-abiding gun owners for the acts of a deranged lunatic our leaders should pass meaningful reforms that would actually prevent future tragedies.’

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump for his proposal to take guns away from dangerous individual even if it violates constitutional rights to due process

Baker said that preventing mass shootings would best be done by addressing the country’s mental health system and boosting background checks so that psychologically ill people are prevented from obtaining a gun.

The NRA spokeswoman said that her organization has always supported policies that promote school safety.

‘Whether you love or hate firearms, we all want to send our children to safe schools and to live in safe communities,’ she said.

But Baker added that this can be done without ‘shifting the focus, blame or burden onto safe, law-abiding gun owners.’

‘Doing everything we can as a nation to address the problem of dangerous people committing heinous acts is not inconsistent with the Second Amendment – the systemic failures of government to keep us safe reinforces the need for the Second Amendment,’ she said.

‘We will continue to support legislative efforts to make our schools and communities safe and oppose gun control schemes that cannot keep us safe and only punish law-abiding Americans.’

Trump angered the NRA earlier on Wednesday, saying he will be giving ‘very serious thought’ to signing legislation that lifts the minimum age for purchasing certain firearms like the AR-15 to 21.

The position is a serious split from the organization, which has been a major backer of Trump’s and most Republicans.

In a listening session with lawmakers on Wednesday, the president acknowledged that his posture wouldn’t be popular with the gun group, but he’ll be ‘giving it a lot of consideration’ anyway.

Trump demanded to know why background check legislation that he wants to use as a vehicle for gun violence prevention measures doesn’t already contain the provision.

‘You know why? Because you’re afraid of the NRA!’ the president told Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican author of the bipartisan bill, with a laugh.

President Donald Trump (seen right with Senator John Cornyn, the Republican from Texas) said he will be giving ‘very serious thought’ to signing legislation that lifts the minimum age for purchasing firearms like the AR-15 to 21

‘You know why? Because you’re afraid of the NRA!’ the president told Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican author of the bipartisan bill, with a laugh

The Pennsylvania lawmaker explained that five years ago, when the legislation first came for a vote in the Senate, an age restriction never came up.

Toomey also argued that the ‘vast majority’ of teens in his state are non-violent.

But the president made clear that he wants Toomey and cosponsor Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, to include the measure in the universal background check bill they plan to revive in the Senate.

The measure failed in a Democratically-controlled 2013, even though it had the backing of 54 senators, because it did not reach the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshhold.

That was roughly four months after the horrific slaughter of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut.

One lawmaker told Trump on Wednesday not to underestimate the power of the gun lobby as the president said over and over again that he couldn’t understand why action was not taken under the previous administration.

‘They have great power over you people,’ Trump replied. ‘Some of you people are petrified of the NRA.’

The president said he told the Second Amendment group, ‘We have to do what’s right.’

Trump said that he truly believes that the NRA also wants to do ‘what’s right’ for Americans.

‘I’m a big fan of the NRA. These are great people. These are great patriots. They love our country. But that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything,’ the president told legislators.

Earlier on in the session, Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from the state that endured the horrible tragedy five years ago that inspired Toomey’s failed background check bill, informed Trump that he would have to take on the NRA if he wanted substantive legislation to pass.

‘There is no other issue out there with the American public like background checks. Ninety-seven percent of Americans want universal background checks. And yet we can’t get it done, there’s nothing else like that. Where it works, people want it and we can’t do it,’ Murphy told the president.

Video playing bottom right…

One lawmaker told Trump on Wednesday not to underestimate the power of the gun lobby as the president said over and over again that he couldn’t understand why action was not taken under the previous administration

Asked if he’d sign legislation making 21 the floor for buying certain firearms, Trump said,’I’ll tell you what, I’m going to give it a lot of consideration, and I’m the one bringing it up, and a lot of people don’t even want to bring it up because they’re afraid to bring it up

Trump rebutted, ‘But you have a different president now.’

To which Murphy said, ‘The reason that nothing has gotten done here is because the gun lobby has had veto power over any legislation that comes before Congress .

‘I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. If all we end up doing is stuff the gun industry supports than this just isn’t worth it, we’re not going to make a difference,’ he told the Republican president, ‘so I’m glad that you sat down with the NRA, but we will get 60 votes on a bill that looks like the Manchin-Toomey compromise on background checks if you, Mr. President, support it.’

The Connecticut Democrat told Trump: ‘If you come to Congress, if you come to Republicans and say we’re going to do a Manchin-Toomey-like bill to get comprehensive background checks, it will pass.

‘But if this meeting ends up with just sort of vague notions of future compromise than nothing will happen.’

Murphy explained that comprehensive background check legislation would have to bar criminals, people who are very mentally ill and individuals on the terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns.

‘But Mr. President it’s going to have to be you that brings the Republicans to the table on this because, right now, the gun lobby would stop it in its tracks,’ he said.

Trump told him, ‘I like that responsibility Chris, I really do. I think it’s time, it’s time that a president stepped up. I’m talking Democrat and Republican presidents, they haven’t stepped up.’

The president urged lawmakers in the room to come up with compromise legislation that encapsulates universal background checks and strengthens the existing system.

He told them he’d like to see age limits included in the merger, as well.

Asked if he’d sign legislation making 21 the floor for buying certain firearms, Trump said,’I’ll tell you what, I’m going to give it a lot of consideration, and I’m the one bringing it up, and a lot of people don’t even want to bring it up because they’re afraid to bring it up.

‘But I will give very serious thought to it,’ he said.

The president said he wants lawmakers to put together ‘something great.’

The president urged lawmakers in the room to come up with compromise legislation that encapsulates universal background checks and strengthens the existing system

Wednesday was the first time that Trump heard from federal lawmakers leading the charge for new gun violence prevention measures in person since the Parkland massacre

At one point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California, was elated when it appeared that Trump expressed support for gun control measures for which she has long advocated.

‘Joe, can you do that? Can you add some of the things?’ Trump asked Manchin.

‘We’re going to get it passed,’ the president said.

During the meeting, Feinstein pressed Trump to endorse an assault weapons ban, but Trump told her she needed to work it out with her colleagues.

He would not go beyond his support for the age restrictions, background checks and concealed carry permits for teachers trained to wield firearms.

Making a reference to his proposal to allowed teachers to pack heat, Trump said, ‘To me something great, is where you stop it from happening, and I think there’s only one way.’

If lawmakers feel that’s the wrong way to attack the problem, Trump told them, ;I want a very strong counter punch.’

Trump predicted a ‘very successful vote’ this time around on gun control legislation.

‘Some people aren’t going to like that, but you’re going to have to look at that very seriously,’ he said, returning to age limits. ‘And I will sign it, and I will call whoever you want me to if I like what you’re doing, and I think I like what you’re doing already, but you can add to it.

‘But you have to be very, very powerful on background checks – don’t be shy – very strong on mentally ill, you have to be very very strong on that, and don’t worry about bump stock, we’re getting rid of it, I mean you don’t have to complicate the bill by adding another two paragraphs.’

The president claimed once again that his administration would be banning the firearms accessory that it plans to recategorize as a machine gun.

‘We’re getting rid of it. I’ll do that myself because I’m able to. Fortunately we’re able to do that without going through Congress,’ he asserted.

Wednesday was the first time that Trump heard from federal lawmakers leading the charge for new gun violence prevention measures in person since the Parkland massacre.

In addition to Machin, Toomey, Feinstein and Murphy, Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP whip in the Senate, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also attended.

Cornyn described President Trump’s meeting about guns today as ‘fascinating television’ and ‘surreal.’

‘My takeaway is that we like to start with background checks and build from there and see where we can get consensus,’ the Texas Republican said.

Cornyn, the Senate’s whip who was seated next to Trump during the meeting, added that rolling multiple gun bills into one was ‘easier said than done.’

The Sunshine State’s Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, says he was not invited.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment on the snub.

A chagrined Nelson told reporters Wednesday afternoon that he was not invited to the president’s chat today with legislators at the White House.

‘I don’t know why I wasn’t invited,’ he said, according to ABC News. ‘And of course that doesn’t foster bipartisanship when you’re trying to solve a problem.’

Trump has been holding listening sessions with parents, students, teachers, state and local officials, law enforcement officers and other stakeholders in the gun control debate, including the National Rifle Association, in the weeks since the Marjory Stoneman massacre.

Yesterday, the White House promised to unveil a set of ‘school safety’ recommendations later this week that will include specific policy initiatives.

The president was already supporting legislation that would incentivize states and agencies to fully comply with existing federal background check mandates. His White House also endorsed a bill this week that funds gun violence prevention training for teachers, law enforcement and students.

Trump last week directed his attorney general to find a way to regulate bump stocks, claiming this week that regardless of what Congress has to say about the matter he’s ‘getting rid’ of the accessory that manipulates semiautomatic rifles.

Other suggestions the president has made had been just that, with the White House pledging hardened stances on Tuesday by the end of the week.

Among those: the proposal to raise the minimum age for some gun purchases and a proposition to allow upwards of 700,000 teachers to carry concealed weapons.

Neither of the proposed remedies to gun violence was gaining traction on Capitol Hill this week as Congress returned from a week-long hiatus.

Sarah Sanders denies that Trump softened stance on gun age limit

A top GOP congressional aide told DailyMail.com on Tuesday that the prospects are ‘pretty dim,’ for age limits that could be why the president appeared to be backing away from it in remarks over the past few days.

‘That proposal won’t get a lot of traction in Congress,’ the source said.

Trump did not put forward the proposal during at Friday speech before conservative activists, and he did not bring it up Monday at a bipartisan meeting with governors at the White House, where gun violence was the top talker during a televised session.

Sources familiar with the White House’s discussions with leadership on Capitol Hill told CNN later that Trump was seemingly moving away from his position.

A senior congressional aide told DailyMail.com that discussions about the president’s proposals, like allowing teachers to pack heat, were still in their early stages, with Congress having been out of session last week and only just returning on Monday to Washington.

Furthermore, the House will be out from today on as the late evangelical pastor Billy Graham lies in honor in the U.S. Capitol.

The source said that the basic posture of the House is to see what can pass in the GOP-controlled Senate, which is focused this week on nominations.

House Republicans have already passed legislation to strengthen the existing background check system that it paired with a concealed carry provision. The Senate version of the background check bill has lingered in the Senate.

Trump informed GOP Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican Party’s top vote counter in the House, on Wednesday that the measure permitting concealed carry reciprocity between states would have to be cut from the bill now in order to get the base background check bill through the more liberal Senate.

‘Let it be a separate bill,’ he warned the GOP leader. ‘If you add concealed carry to this, you’ll never get it passed.’

Trump has said he favors comprehensive legislation, but the White House had refused to take a position on universal background checks prior to Trump’s assertion on Wednesday that he supports them.

‘We’d have to see what it looks like and review that before we make that determination,’ press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday.

Sanders was equally non-committal on Tuesday in her daily briefing when questioned about the president’s support for the bill put together by Manchin and Toomey.

‘The President, as I’ve said, expects to meet with a number of lawmakers tomorrow from both sides of the aisle, and we’ll have some more information about specifics after that,’ she asserted.

The Trump spokeswoman insisted Tuesday, as she did Monday, that the president remains supportive of the proposition to make sales of the AR-15 and other automatic rifles 21 and over, despite the National Rifle Association’s adamant opposition to the measure.

‘He knows that everybody doesn’t necessarily agree,’ Sanders explained. ‘We’re not going to get into the details on the specifics of what we will propose.’

On Monday, Sanders said that Trump had not ‘downgraded’ his proposal.

‘The president is still supportive of the concept,’ she said, as a weekend meeting with the National Rifle Association that was kept off Trump’s public schedule came to light.

The NRA does not support new age restrictions on firearms sales and its spokeswoman suggested Sunday that Trump was not firmly committed to his position.

‘These are just things that he’s discussing right now,’ spokesman Dana Loesch said during an appearance on ABC News.

Sanders told reporters on Monday that it ‘would be ridiculous’ to intimate that Trump had been influenced by the powerful gun group that opposes the restrictions ‘considering the number of individuals he’s met with that come from both the far left to the far right, and a lot of those in between.’

She said Trump plans to continue his talks with a lawmakers this week in meetings at the White House and would ultimately base his decision on what is outlined in legislative text.

‘In concept, the President still supports it, but in terms of legislation, we’d need to see what that looks like before we weigh in further,’ Sanders said.

White House communications director Hope Hicks to resign

Hope Hicks To Resign As President Trump’s White House Communications Director | TIME

Why is Hope Hicks, Trump’s longest-serving aide, resigning?

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks made the surprising announcement on Wednesday that she will leave the Trump administration in the coming weeks. The news comes a day after Hicks testifies for hours before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia probe. Judy Woodruff learns more from Ashley Parker of The Washington Post.

Why did Hope Hicks resign? Even the good option looks bad.

Officials announced on Feb. 28 that Hope Hicks will resign. She had been White House communications director since Sept. 2017.(The Washington Post)

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is resigning less than six months after officially taking that job on a permanent basis. And according to a timeline provided by the reporter who broke the story, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, Hicks spent a substantial portion of her tenure — perhaps as much as half of it — considering leaving.

Hope Hicks departure is NOT about yesterday’s hearing, per multiple sources. She had planned it before, had been thinking about it for months. She had informed a very small number of people prior to Hill hearing that she planned to leave.

It was tempting to draw a line — as Iand others speculated about — between Hicks’s exit and two controversies: Her involvement in the Rob Porter scandal as both communications director and his girlfriend, and her House Intelligence Committee testimony Tuesday in which she admitted to telling white lies for Trump. If nothing else, the timing is suspicious for a resignation to come so close in proximity to each of those two things.

But consider the alternative. The alternative is that someone who has been in the White House for 13 months started thinking about leaving well shy of a year on the staff — and shortly after rising to one of the top jobs. The point: Regardless of which one it was, it doesn’t portend good things or stability in the White House moving forward.

It’s no secret the White House has become something of a revolving door for staff. Hicks was the fifth person designated as communications director and the third to hold the job on a non-interim basis. Trump has also already parted ways with a press secretary, a national security adviser, a chief strategist, a chief of staff (with his second, John Kelly, apparently on thin ice) and plenty of others.

Hicks was supposed to be different. Perhaps his longest-serving aide — dating back to before the campaign — she was someone who understood Trump and seemed to command his implicit trust. The White House would be a stressful job for anyone, but Hicks at least benefited from the kind of strong working relationship with Trump that other figures — especially those from the GOP establishment — clearly did not have.

She was not as familiar with politics as others, but in a White House in which conflictswith the boss are often the cause for early departures, Hicks made sense as a potential long-termer. Like Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon, Sean Spicer and the rest, though, she has now proven a short-timer. Even fellow Trump loyalists like Keith Schiller have found the White House to be tough long-term employment.

Whether it’s because of exhaustion in dealing with Trump or the exhaustion in dealing with Washington politics for outsiders like Hicks, or a combination, it seems Trump will have a difficult time maintaining anything resembling a core staff organization. And for a president who has struggled with consistency and is thought to be heavily reliant upon the last person he has spoken to, that’s likely to lead to even more volatility.

We may yet learn more about Hicks’s departure in the days to come. Nothing about it, though, suggests stability is over the horizon for the White House. If anything was stability for Trump, it was Hicks.

Turnover, investigations have Trump administration adrift

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rattled by two weeks of muddled messages, departures and spitting matches between the president and his own top officials, Donald Trump is facing a shrinking circle of trusted advisers and a staff that’s grim about any prospect of a reset.

Even by the standards of Trump’s often chaotic administration, the announcement of Hope Hicks’ imminent exit spread new levels of anxiety across the West Wing and cracked open disputes that had been building since the White House’s botched handling of domestic violence allegations against a senior aide late last month.

One of Trump’s most loyal and longest-serving aides, Hicks often served as human buffer between the unpredictable president and the business of government. One official on Thursday compared the instability caused by her departure to that of a chief of staff leaving the administration — though that prospect, too, remained a possibility given the questions that have arisen about John Kelly’s competence.

Hicks’ departure comes as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation appears to be circling the Oval Office, with prosecutors questioning Trump associates about both his business dealings before he became president and his actions in office, according to people with knowledge of the interviews. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has also been weakened after being stripped of his high-level security clearance amid revelations about potential conflicts of interest.

Communications Director Hope Hicks, one of President Trump’s most trusted aides, abruptly announced her resignation Wednesday. Julie Pace says Hicks is under the political magnifying glass, which might have affected her decision. (Feb. 28)

The biggest unknown is how the mercurial Trump will respond to Hicks’ departure and Kushner’s more limited access, according to some of the 16 White House officials, congressional aides and outside advisers interviewed by The Associated Press, most of whom insisted on anonymity in order to disclose private conversations and meetings. Besides Kushner and his wife, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump, most remaining White House staffers were not part of Trump’s close-knit 2016 campaign. One person who speaks to Trump regularly said the president has become increasingly wistful about the camaraderie of that campaign.

Rarely has a modern president confronted so many crises and controversies across so many fronts at the same time. After 13 months in office, there’s little expectation among many White House aides and outside allies that Trump can quickly find his footing or attract new, top-flight talent to the West Wing. And some Republican lawmakers, who are eying a difficult political landscape in November’s midterm elections, have begun to let private frustrations ooze out in public.

“There is no standard operating practice with this administration,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. “Every day is a new adventure for us.”

Thune’s comments described the White House’s peculiar rollout Thursday of controversial new aluminum and steel tariffs. White House aides spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning scrambling to steer the president away from an announcement on an unfinished policy, with even Kelly in the dark about Trump’s plans. Aides believed they had succeeded in getting Trump to back down and hoped to keep television cameras away from an event with industry executives so the president couldn’t make a surprise announcement. But Trump summoned reporters into the Cabinet Room anyway and declared that the U.S. would levy penalties of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports.

Some of Trump’s populist supporters cheered the move. The stock market, which Trump looks to for validation for his economic policies, plunged.

Some officials are bracing for more departures. On Thursday, NBC News reported that the White House was preparing to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster as early as next month.

As for talk of a White House in upheaval, Sanders pointed out the tax cuts passed late last year: “If they want to call it chaos, fine, but we call it success and productivity and we’re going to keep plugging along.”

For those remaining on the job, the turbulence has been relentless. Just two weeks ago, Kelly, the general brought in to bring order, was himself on the ropes for his handling of the domestic violence allegations against a close aide, Rob Porter. Trump was said to be deeply irritated by the negative press coverage of Kelly’s leadership during the controversy and considering firing him. But first, the president planned to give his chief of staff a chance to defend himself before reporters in the briefing room and gauge the reaction, according to two people with knowledge of the episode. The briefing, however, was canceled after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Kelly’s standing has stabilized somewhat as media attention to the Porter issue has waned.

Graphic shows key departures from Trump administration.

One Kelly backer said the chief of staff’s standing remains tenuous, in part because of his clashes with Kushner over policy, personnel and White House structure. The tensions were exacerbated by Kelly’s decision to downgrade Kushner’s security clearance because the senior adviser had not been permanently approved for the highest level of access.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who also serves as a senior White House adviser, have been frustrated by Kelly’s attempt to restrict their access to the president, and they perceive his new crackdown on clearances as a direct shot at them, according to White House aides and outside advisers. Kelly, in turn, has grown frustrated with what he views as the couple’s freelancing. He blames them for changing Trump’s mind at the last minute and questions what exactly they do all day, according to one White House official and an outside ally.

The ethics questions dogging Kushner relate to both his personal financial interests and his dealings in office with foreign officials. Intelligence officials expressed concern that Kushner’s business dealings were a topic of discussion in conversations he was having with foreign officials about foreign policy issues of interest to the U.S. government, a former intelligence official said. Separately, The New York Times reported that two companies made loans worth more than half a billion dollars to Kushner’s family real estate firm after executives met with Kushner at the White House.

Allies of Kushner and Ivanka Trump insist they have no plans to leave the White House in the near future. As for Kelly, he appeared to hint at his tough spot during an event Thursday at the Department of Homeland Security, where he served as secretary before departing for the White House.

“The last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life, being the secretary of homeland security,” he said at the agency’s 15th anniversary celebration in Washington. “But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.”

Story 1: Democrat Schiff Memo Confirms Once Again The FBI and Department of Justice Mislead Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court By Failing To Disclose The Steele Dossier Was Not An Intelligence Report But Clinton Campaign and Democratic Party Paid For Opposition Research Used To Smear Candidate and President Elect Donald J. Trump — Clinton Obama Democrat Conspiracy Aided and Abetted By Big Lie Media — When Will The Criminal Conspirators Be Prosecuted? — Videos

Tucker: FISA memo likely played role in McCabe ‘removal’

The Schiff Memo Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.Maybe Adam Schiff has more of a sense of humor than I’d have given him credit for. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat begins his long-awaited memo — the minority response to the Nunes memo that was penned by staffers of the committee’s Republican majority — by slamming Chairman Devin Nunes’s unconscionable “risk of public exposure of sensitive sources and methods for no legitimate purpose.” The Schiff memo, which has been delayed for weeks because the FBI objected to its gratuitous effort to publicize highly classified intelligence, including methods and sources, then proceeds to tell its tale through what appear to be scores of blacked-out redactions of information Schiff pushed to expose.

Heavy Reliance on Steele Dossier Confirmed
The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This passage puts the lie to two of the main Democratic talking points:

1) This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump–Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.

It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

Moreover, because Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his “clandestine” activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

2) Democrats implausibly insist that what “launched” the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was not Steele’s allegations but intelligence from Australia about George Papadopoulos’s contact with what Democrats elusively describe as “individuals linked to Russia.” As we learned when Papadopoulos pled guilty, though, it is anything but clear that these “individuals linked to Russia” had much in the way of links to Putin’s regime: London-based academic Joseph Mifsud, who is from Malta and apparently does not speak Russian; an unidentified woman who falsely pretended to be Putin’s niece; and Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian-government-funded think tank.

Even if we assume for argument’s sake that these characters had solid regime connections — rather than that they were boasting to impress the credulous young Papadopoulos — they were patently not in the same league as Sechin, a Putin crony, and Divyekin, a highly placed regime official. And that, manifestly, is how the FBI and the DOJ saw the matter: They sought a FISA warrant on Page, not Papadopoulos. And, as the above-excerpted passage shows, they highlighted the Steele dossier’s sensational allegations about Page and then feebly tried to corroborate those allegations with some Papadopoulos information, not the other way around. (More on that when we get to Schiff’s notion of “corroboration.”)

Concealing the Dossier’s Clinton-Campaign Origins
Another major takeaway from the Schiff memo is that the FBI and the DOJ withheld from the FISA court the fact that Steele’s work was a project of the Clinton campaign. Naturally, the reader must ferret this admission out of a couple of dense paragraphs, in which Democrats risibly claim that the “DOJ was transparent with the Court about Steele’s sourcing.”

How’s this for transparency? The FISA warrant application says that Steele, referred to as “Source #1,” was “approached by” Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, referred to as “an identified U.S. person,” who

indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. Person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. Person and Source #1 have a longstanding business relationship.) The identified U.S. Person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign. [Emphasis in Schiff memo, p. 5]

The first thing to notice here is the epistemological contortions by which the DOJ rationalized concealing that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for Steele’s reporting. They ooze consciousness of guilt. If you have to go through these kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid disclosing something, it’s because you know that being “transparent” demands disclosing it.

Next, Schiff — again, hilariously enough to make you wonder if it’s done tongue-in-cheek — accuses Nunes of hypocrisy for condemning the omission of Mrs. Clinton’s name after having rebuked the Obama administration’s “unmasking” of American names. Of course, the two things have nothing to do with each other.

“Unmasking” refers to the revelation of American identities in intelligence reports. These are Americans who, though not targeted as foreign agents, are incidentally intercepted in surveillance. In marked contrast, we are talking here about a FISA warrant application, not an intelligence report. In a warrant application, it is the DOJ’s honorable practice, and the judiciary’s expectation, that the court must be informed about the material biases of the sources of the factual allegations that the DOJ claims amount to probable cause.

As the Democrats’ own excerpt from the FISA application illustrates, unmasking has nothing to do with it, because there is no need to use names at all: Note that Simpson is referred to as “an identified U.S. person”; Perkins-Coie is referred to as “a U.S.-based law firm.” The dispute here is not about the failure to use the words “Hillary Clinton.” They could have referred to “Candidate #2.”To state that “Candidate #2” had commissioned Steele’s research would have been just as easy and every bit as appropriate as the DOJ’s reference to a “Candidate #1,” who might have “ties to Russia.” Had DOJ done the former, it would not have “unmasked” Hillary Clinton any more than Donald Trump was unmasked by DOJ’s description of him as “Candidate #1”; but it would have been being “transparent” with the FISA court. By omitting any reference to Clinton, the DOJ was being the opposite of transparent.

Two other things to notice here.

1) The DOJ’s application asserted: “The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” There is only one reason to include such a statement: The DOJ well understood that the implied biases in the process of compiling the dossier’s allegations, including Steele’s implied biases, were material to the FISA court’s evaluation. A prosecutor does not get to tell a judge reasons that a source’s reports should be thought free of bias while leaving out why they should not be thought free of bias. If you know it’s necessary to disclose that “identified U.S. person” Simpson was being paid by “a U.S.-based law firm” (Perkins-Coie), then it is at least equally necessary to disclose that, in turn, the law firm was being paid by its clients: the Clinton campaign and the DNC. To tell half the story is patently misleading.

2) Schiff comically highlights this DOJ assertion as if it were his home run, when it is in fact damning: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.” This is the vague reference that Democrats and Trump critics laughably say was adequate disclosure of the dossier’s political motivation. But why would the FBI “speculate” that a political motive was “likely” involved when, in reality, the FBI well knew that a very specific political motive was precisely involved?

There was no reason for supposition here. If the FBI had transparently disclosed that the dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign — oh, sorry, didn’t mean to unmask; if the FBI had transparently disclosed that the dossier was a product of “Candidate #2’s” campaign — then the court would have been informed about the apodictic certainty that the people behind the dossier were trying to discredit the campaign of Candidate #2’s opponent. It is disingenuous to tell a judge that something is “likely” when, in fact, it is beyond any doubt.

The Issue Is the Credibility of Steele’s Informants, Not of Steele Himself
When the Justice Department seeks a warrant from a court, the credibility that matters is not that of the agent who has assembled the information from the informants; it is that of the informants who observe the fact matters that are claimed to be a basis for finding probable cause. That is, what mattered was the credibility of Steele’s anonymous Russian sources, not the credibility of Steele himself. By dwelling on the countless reasons why Schiff is wrong about the adequacy of the disclosure of Steele’s biases, I am falling into the trap I have warned against (here, and in section C here).

The FBI and the DOJ relied vicariously on Steele’s credibility, as a substitute for their failure to corroborate his informants’ information. It was improper to do this.

To be clear, the only reason Steele’s own biases have any pertinence is that the FBI and the DOJ relied vicariously on Steele’s credibility, as a substitute for their failure to corroborate his informants’ information. It was improper to do this. Yet even if a prosecutor goes down a certain road wrongly, the duty to be candid with the tribunal still applies. The prosecutor is obliged to tell the whole story about potential bias, not a skewed version.

Schiff’s memo struggles mightily, and futilely, to demonstrate that Steele’s credibility issues were sufficiently disclosed. But that is a side issue. The question is whether Steele’s informants were credible. To the limited extent that committee Democrats grapple with this problem, they tell us that, after the first FISA application, the FBI and the DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s informants. There are four problems with this:

1) It would not justify using uncorroborated allegations in the first warrant.

2) The supposedly corroborative information is blacked out; while that may be an appropriate protection of sensitive intelligence, we are still left having to take Schiff’s word for it.

3) Taking Schiff’s word for it would be unwise given his memo’s warped conception of “corroboration.” Recall the Schiff memo passage excerpted in the first section above. In the last part, the Democrats argue that the dossier claim that Page met with Kremlin official Divyekin was somehow corroborated because it “closely tracked” what Papadopoulos was hearing from his dubious “Russian contacts.” But the supposed “Russian contacts” were telling Papadopoulos that the Kremlin had thousands of Clinton-related emails. That did nothing to confirm Steele’s claim that Page had met with Divyekin, a top regime official; nor did it corroborate that the “kompromat” Divyekin referred to was the same thing as the emails that Papadopoulos’s “Russian contacts” were talking about. (Of course, it may well be that Page never actually met with Divyekin and that Papadopoulos’s sources were wrong about emails; if so, committee Democrats are in the strange position of contending that the non-existent can corroborate the non-existent.)

4) Most significantly, Democrats seem not to grasp that the flaw here lies not merely in the failure to corroborate the information from Steele’s sources. There appears not even to be corroboration that these sources existed — i.e., that they are real people whose claims are accurately reported. Indeed, it is worse than that. Even if we stipulate for argument’s sake that Steele’s anonymous Russian informants are authentic, they are generally hearsay witnesses, one or more steps removed from the events they relate. The real question, then, is whether the informants’ sources are real, identifiable, reliable informants. Based on what has been disclosed, we must assume that the FBI did not know. That is why the DOJ inappropriately tried to rely on Steele’s credibility.

The FBI Interviews of Carter Page
In the course of providing a skewed portrait of Carter Page’s background, the Schiff memo unintentionally highlights another deep flaw in the warrant application.

The memo limns Page as a master spy with disturbing “connections to Russian Government and Intelligence Officials” — which will be amusing to anyone who has seen an interview of Page, now a ubiquitous oddball media presence. What Democrats conveniently omit is that (a) Page cooperated with the FBI and Justice Department in a prior investigation in which his information was used to prosecute Russian spies; (b) the Russian spies explicitly regarded him as an “idiot” (and they had not even seen him on cable TV); and (c) since Russian operatives can be as diabolical and sophisticated as the Democrats suggest, they would have known that Page did not have the kind of relationship with Trump that would have made Page a suitable conduit for proposing traitorous deals — and as we’ve seen, the Russians had far better ways to approach Trump (e.g., the Kremlin-connected oligarch Aras Agalarov, who had a personal relationship with Trump and orchestrated the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting).

The memo does note that “the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian intelligence contacts.” Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI.

Why didn’t the FBI call Page in for an interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? It is a requirement of FISA law.

So . . . here’s the question: When Steele brought the FBI his unverified allegations that Page had met with Sechin and Divyekin, why didn’t the FBI call Page in for an interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? Lest you wonder, this is not an instance of me second-guessing the Bureau with an investigative plan I think would have been better. It is a requirement of FISA law.

When the FBI and DOJ apply for a FISA warrant, they must convince the court that surveillance — a highly intrusive tactic by which the government monitors all of an American citizen’s electronic communications — is necessary because the foreign-intelligence information the government seeks “cannot reasonably be obtained by normal investigative techniques.” (See FISA, Section 1804(a)(6)(C) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) Normal investigative techniques include interviewing the subject. There are, of course, situations in which such alternative investigative techniques would inevitably fail — a mafia don or a jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything he knows. But Carter Page was not only likely to do so, he had a documented history of providing information to the FBI.

It would be very interesting to see what the DOJ told the FISA court about why normal investigative techniques would not suffice to pry information from Page. They certainly seem to work fine for Fox News.

The Page Surveillance Enabled Interception of Past Communications
The Schiff memo repeats the canard that the Obama administration was not really spying on the Trump campaign because the DOJ waited until the Trump campaign cut ties with Page before seeking a surveillance warrant. What Democrats fail to mention is that the surveillance enabled the FBI to intercept not only his forward-going communications but also any stored emails and texts he might have had. Clearly, they were hoping to find a motherlode of campaign communications. Remember, Page was merely the vehicle for surveillance; the objective was to probe Trump ties to Russia.

The “Closely Held Investigative Team”
Schiff is determined to run with the implausible story that George Papadopoulos is the face that launched a thousand ships — that Papadopoulos’s boozy conversation with an Australian diplomat, not the Steele dossier’s allegations of a traitorous Trump–Russia conspiracy, was the true impetus for the counterintelligence investigation. Schiff maintains that the FBI was therefore not even paying attention to Steele until long after the Papadopoulos information came in. That is, even though the Bureau started receiving Steele’s reports in July 2016, they did not make their way to the FBI’s “closely held investigative team” for some seven weeks — i.e., until mid September. This team is described elsewhere (p. 3) in the Schiff memo as “the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters.” Of course, by mid September, Steele and Fusion GPS were leaking Steele’s allegations to many favored reporters, so perhaps Schiff is saying that the “closely held investigative team” read about them in the news.

It is, in any event, a frivolous point. The fact that the Bureau administratively opened a case on Papadopoulos does not mean that much of anything was done on it. As we know, investigators did not even interview Papadopoulos until late January 2017, after Trump had already taken office and about six months after they received the info about Papadopoulos. By contrast, once the “closely held investigative team” got the Steele dossier, the FBI and the DOJ were at the FISA court’s doorstep tout de suite. And to repeat, they got a surveillance warrant for Page, not Papadopoulos.

Meantime, Schiff needs to make up his mind about the significance of the “closely held investigative team.” Near the end of the memo, he raps Nunes for pointing to the anti-Trump animus evident in the texts of FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. These Bureau officials are not important, Schiff says, because neither of them was the “affiant” on any of the FISA warrant applications.

But wait: Strzok and Page were part of the “closely held investigative team,” which Schiff has only just told us are the only FBI personnel who matter. Anyway, though he is wont to remind us every few minutes that he is a former prosecutor, Schiff seems unfamiliar with how investigations work. The affiant on a warrant application aggregates the information of many agents and informants. A warrant is a team effort, which I had thought was why Schiff stressed the “closely held investigative team.” And Page was a lawyer, not an agent, so though she would presumably not be the affiant on a warrant application, she may well have participated in the FBI’s legal review of the applications, which occurs both in-house and in consultation with Justice Department lawyers.

Four Different FISA-Court Judges
Schiff makes much of the fact that the four FISA warrants (the original authorization and three renewals, at 90-day intervals) were signed by four different FISA-court judges — all apparently appointed to the federal district courts by Republican presidents. This hardly commends the validity of the warrants.

In criminal surveillance orders, for example, it is common for prosecutors to bring renewal applications back to the same judge who authorized the original surveillance. That judge presumably knows the case better and is thus in a superior position to detect any irregularities. If FISA surveillance works differently, that would be another reason for critics to fear that the court is merely a rubber stamp. (For what it’s worth, I don’t share the view that the FISA court merely rubber-stamps applications. The process is a give-and-take one, and though the FISA court rarely rejects warrants, the DOJ does modify many warrants in response to the court’s concerns. Moreover, since surveillance of foreign threats to the U.S. is an executive responsibility, the court should approve them unless it appears that the FBI and the DOJ are abusing the process.)

In any event, the issue here is failure to disclose information to the court. If a judge was not made aware of material facts, the judge’s authorization of a warrant does not validate the derelict application. (That said, it is difficult to understand why judges would not be troubled by the lack of corroboration of Steele’s unidentified Russian hearsay informants.)

The Basis for Steele’s Termination as an FBI Informant

The FISA judges were not told that Steele had lied to the FBI about contacts with the press.

The Schiff memo is disingenuous in claiming that the warrant applications were forthright with the FISA court about the reasons for Steele’s termination as an FBI source. The Grassley-Graham memoexplains (as I’ve previously detailed) that the court was apparently told that Steele was dismissed over contacts with the press. The FISA judges were not told that Steele had liedto the FBI about contacts with the press.

Papadopoulos and the Clinton Emails
Committee Democrats misrepresent a significant fact derived from Special Counsel Mueller’s statement of Papadopoulos’s offense (filed when the latter pled guilty). The Schiff memo states

We would later learn in Papadopoulos’s plea that the information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What we actually learned in Papadopoulos’s plea was that his dubious Russian sources had heard that the Kremlin had the emails. There is no indication that the Kremlin in fact had the emails; the Kremlin apparently provided no emails to Papadopoulos (or anyone else in Trump’s orbit); and there is no evidence that the “Russia-linked” people to whom Papadopoulos spoke knew what they were talking about — it is at least as plausible that they were playing Papadopoulos.

The Use of a Media Report to ‘Corroborate’ Steele
Committee Democrats make a highly unlikely claim about the DOJ’s controversial use in the FISA warrant applications of a Yahoo News report by journalist Michael Isikoff. The claim appears to be contradicted by both the aforementioned Grassley-Graham memo and by the Isikoff article itself.

Specifically, the Schiff memo denies the Republican claim that the DOJ tried to corroborate Steele’s allegations by relying on Isikoff’s media story, dated September 23, 2016. Rather, Schiff says the Isikoff report was mentioned for a righteous purpose: “to inform the Court of Page’s public denial of his suspected meetings in Russia” (with Sechin and Divyekin). The memo further claims that the FISA application cited another news story along these lines, but that the Nunes memo withheld this detail.

Schiff’s version has two problems.

1) While it is true (as noted above) that Page denies meeting Sechin and Divyekin, it is not true that this denial is reported in Isikoff’s article. Instead, Isikoff reported that Page “declined repeated requests to comment for this story.” He added that, while in Moscow in July 2016, “Page declined to say whether he was meeting with Russian officials during his trip” — not that he denied doing so. Isikoff, who is a superb reporter, also took pains to explain that it was merely “alleged” that Page had met with high-ranking Russians — that is, the meetings had not been confirmed. But there is nothing in Isikoff’s article about Page himself denying that they occurred. It is therefore hard to understand why the DOJ would, as Schiff suggests, include the article as a way of informing the court that Page denied the meetings.

2) Schiff’s version is contradicted by the Grassley-Graham memo, which quotes the FISA warrant application. Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham recount (memo, p. 3) that “the FISA applications note the existence of” Isikoff’s article, “which in particular contained some of the same dossier information about Mr. Page compiled by Mr. Steele and on which the FBI relied in its application.” The senators then quote from the FISA application, which said:

Given that the information contained in the September 23rd news article generally matches the information about Page that [Steele] discovered during his/her research, [two lines redacted.] The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press. [Brackets in original]

The senators’ memo strongly suggests that Nunes is right and Schiff is wrong: The Isikoff article was used precisely because, to quote the DOJ again, it “generally matched” Steele’s allegations about Page. In effect, the DOJ was using Steele to corroborate Steele.

Schiff’s Defense of Bruce Ohr
Schiff’s attack on the Nunes memo for referring to top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s connections with Steele is utterly unpersuasive — a “How dare you” argument that rests on Schiff’s description of Ohr as “a well-respected career professional.”

Republicans did not attack Ohr personally or belittle his law-enforcement credentials. To the contrary, the Nunes memo argued that because Ohr was a high-ranking official — the right-hand of Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who was effectively running DOJ — it should have been disclosed to the court that (a) Ohr was meeting with Steele about the anti-Trump project; (b) Steele had told Ohr in September (i.e., before the first FISA application) that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president”; and (c) Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was a Russia expert at Fusion who was collaborating with Steele on the dossier. If Schiff thinks that is unreasonable, I expect most people will disagree.

Conclusion
In sum, the Schiff memo does more to harm than to advance the Democrats’ defense of the Obama administration and the use of the FISA process by the FBI and the DOJ.

Democrat’s FISA memo doesn’t refute GOP charges

For all the hype and breathless commentary by Democrat cheerleaders in the media, the memo released on Friday by the House Intelligence Committee Democrats fails to live up to its key claims.

It provides no information to disprove the Republican claim that the Department of Justice and the FBI relied heavily on the phony Steele Trump-Russia “dossier” to obtain the first of four FISA search warrants against Trump volunteer, Carter Page.

It fails to establish that DoJ and the FBI properly informed the FISA court that the fake Steele dossier had been commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It fails to counter the GOP claim that FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe admitted to the House Intelligence committee during his closed-door testimony on December 19, 2017 that without the dossier, the government never could have obtained a FISA court warrant to spy on U.S. citizen Carter Page.

And yet, the Democrats claim they accomplished all three in their 10 page counter-memo. They do so by throwing sand in the eyes of the American people, misrepresenting the facts and introducing alternate facts in an effort at misdirection.

For example, right on the first page, the Democrat memo introduces the first of a series of straw man arguments.“Christopher Steele’s raw intelligence reporting did not inform the FBI’s decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” the Democrats claim.

But that’s not what the Nunes memo alleged. The original Republican memo focused almost exclusively on the procedures employed by the FBI and DoJ to obtain four FISA court warrants to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page. On page 4 of their memo, the GOP authors state that the initial FISA application “also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos,” and that this information “triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok.”

The Democrat memo uses heavy brush strokes to paint a picture of Carter Page as a likely Russian spy, noting that he “resided in Moscow from 2004-2007 and pursued business deals with Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom,” and that a “Russian intelligence officer (redacted) targeted Page for recruitment.”

Continuing in this vein, the Democrats note that in 2013, federal prosecutors “indicted three other Russian spies, two of whom targeted Page for recruitment,” and then give a dripping report of “Page’s suspicious activity during the 2016 campaign.”

Frankly, if I were Carter Page I would consider suing Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Mass.), the Democrat ranking member of the House intelligence committee responsible for this scurrilous screed, for defamation.

The amount of misleading information about Page contained in these pages is extraordinary and amounts to character assassination.

For example, federal prosecutors have stated on the record that Page willingly came to the FBI in 2013 when individuals he suspected of working for Russian intelligence tried to recruit him at an energy conference.

Page’s willingness to work with federal law enforcement against suspected Russia agents in the United States led to a federal sealed indictment against three of those agents in January 2015. Page acknowledged his role in that case in 2017 interview with Buzzfeed.

The intent of the Democrats through these heady allegations is to focus attention on Carter Page, so we forget about the Steele dossier, which was the subject of the Nunes memo they claim to be “refuting.”

The Democrats next claim that DoJ “repeatedly informed the (FISA) Court about Steele’s background, credibility, and potential bias.”

The Nunes memo only differs with them on that final point, Steele’s bias. And this is precisely where DoJ and the FBI misled the FISA court.

“DoJ in fact informed the Court accurately that Steele was hired by politically-motivated U.S. persons and entities and that his research appeared intended for use ‘to discredit’ Trump’s campaign,” the Democrats assert.

That is true, and the Nunes memo never claims the contrary. But that is a far cry from telling the FISA judges that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

At the time of the FISA court application, in October 2016, Donald Trumphad enemies all across the political spectrum, so to inform the court that one of these sources had hired Steele would not have come as a surprise. But the fact Steele was hired by the DNC? Nowhere did that information appear in the FISA Court application, a fact that the Democrat memo does not — and cannot — deny.

Democrats were quick to claim that the Nunes memo misrepresented the Dec. 19, 2017 testimony by deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe before the Committee, and that McCabe never told them that without the Steele dossier, the FBI and DoJ could never have gotten the FISA warrants on Carter Page.

While McCabe is mentioned several times in the latest Democrat memo, its authors are presumably careful not to challenge a fact that could be corroborated in the transcript of McCabe’s testimony, which both Republicans and Democrats have now seen. Without the Steele dossier, McCabe said, FBI and DoJ could never have gotten the FISA warrant; indeed, an earlier effort without the dossier, failed. The Democratic memo doesn’t challenge this fact.

The original Nunes memo revealed the scandalous politicization of our intelligence community in its efforts to mislead the American public with phony tales of Trump-Russia collusion. The Democrats memo just continues this politicization.

The intelligence community should not be in the business of peddling a narrative to the American people, let alone investigating the political opponents of the party in power.

Education and business

After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2001 he received a Master of Business Administration degree from New York University.[10][14] In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm’s London office, was a vice president in the company’s Moscow office,[3] and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch’s energy and power department in New York.[11] Page has stated that he worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading Russian energy companies. According to business people interviewed by Politico in 2016, Page’s work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers.[3]

After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy Capital with partner James Richard and a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko.[3][15] The fund operates out of a Manhattan co-working space shared with a booking agency for wedding bands, and as of late 2017, Page was the firm’s sole employee.[2] Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project.[2][3]

Page received his Ph.D. in 2012 from SOAS, University of London, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner.[2][10] His doctoral dissertation on the transition of Asian countries from communism to capitalism was rejected twice before ultimately being accepted by new examiners. One of his original examiners later said Page “knew next to nothing” about the subject matter and was unfamiliar with “basic concepts” such as Marxism and state capitalism.[16] He sought unsuccessfully to publish his dissertation as a book; a reviewer described it as “very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument.”[2] Page blamed the rejection on anti-Russian and anti-American bias.[16] He later ran an international affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University.[17][18]

In more recent years Page has written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University in the UK.[3]

Foreign policy and links to Russia

In 1998, Page joined the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm, but left three months later. In 2017, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer recalled on his Twitter feed that Page’s strong pro-Russian stance was “not a good fit” for the firm and that Page was its “most wackadoodle” alumnus.[19]Stephen Sestanovich later described Page’s foreign-policy views as having “an edgy Putinist resentment” and a sympathy to Russian leader Vladimir Putin‘s criticisms of the United States.[2] Over time, Page became increasingly critical of United States foreign policy toward Russia, and more supportive of Putin, with a United States official describing Page as “a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did”.[4] Page is frequently quoted by Russian state television, where he is presented as a “famous American economist”.[3] In 2013, Russian intelligence operatives attempted to recruit Page, and one described him as enthusiastic about business opportunities in Russia but an “idiot”.[2][20] News accounts in 2017 indicated that because of these ties to Russia, Page had been the subject of a warrant pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2014, at least two years earlier than was indicated in the stories concerning his role in the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald Trump.[21][22]

Shortly after Page resigned from the Trump campaign, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained another warrant (he was subject to one in 2014) from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016 to surveil Page’s communications.[25] To issue the warrant, a federal judge concluded there was probable cause to believe that Page was a foreign agent knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence for the Russian government.[26] Page was the only American who was directly targeted with a FISA warrant in 2016 as part of the Russia probe, and the initial 90-day warrant was subsequently renewed at least three times.[27]

The Trump Administration attempted to distance itself from Page, saying that he had never met Mr. Trump or advised him about anything,[2] but a December 2016 Page press conference in Russia contradicts the claim that Page and Trump never met.[34] Page responded to a question on that topic with the reply “I’ve certainly been in a number of meetings with him and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him.”[35] According to Page’s testimony before the intelligence committee, Page kept senior officials in the Trump campaign, such as Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks and JD Gordon, informed about his contacts with the Russians.[36]

Page testified that he had met with Russian government officials during this trip and had sent a post-meeting report via email to members of the Trump campaign.[43] He also indicated that campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his trip.[44] Elements of Page’s testimony contradicted prior claims by Trump, Sessions, and others in the Trump administration.[40][43][45][46] Lewandowski, who had previously denied knowing Page or meeting him during the campaign, said after Page’s testimony that his memory was refreshed and acknowledged that he had been aware of Page’s trip to Russia.[47]

Page also testified that after delivering a commencement speech at the New Economic School in Moscow, he spoke briefly with one of the people in attendance, Arkady Dvorkovich, a Deputy Prime Minister in Dmitry Medvedev‘s cabinet, contradicting his previous statements not to have spoken to anyone connected with the Russian government.[48] In addition, while Page denied a meeting with Sechin as alleged in the Trump–Russia dossier, he did say he met with Andrey Baranov, Rosneft‘s head of investor relations.[49] The dossier alleges that Sechin offered Page a deal for Trump of a 19% privatized stake (ca. $11 billion) in Rosneft oil company in exchange for Trump lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia[50][51] after his election. It is also alleged that Page confirmed, on Trump’s “full authority”, that this was Trump’s intent.[52][53][54][49][55][56] Page testified that he did not “directly” express support for lifting the sanctions during the meeting with Baranov, but that he might have mentioned the proposed Rosneft transaction.[49]

Read the full text of Trump’s CPAC speech

The president used an old story about a snake to talk about immigrants in America.

President Donald Trump delivered a speech Friday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Here is a full rush transcript of his remarks.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt, for that great introduction. And thank you for this big crowd. This is incredible. Really incredible. We have all come a long way together. We have come a long way together.

I’m thrilled to be back at CPAC, with so many of my wonderful friends and amazing supporters and proud conservatives. Remember when I first started running? Because I wasn’t a politician, fortunately, but do you remember I started running and people said, are you sure he’s a conservative? I think I proved I’m a conservative.

For more than four decades, this event has served as a forum for our nation’s top leaders, activists, writers, and thinkers.

Year after year, leaders have stood on this stage to discuss what we can do together to protect our heritage, to promote our culture, and to defend our freedom. CPAC has always been about big ideas, and it has also been about putting those ideas into action — and CPAC really has put a lot of ideas into action. We’ll talk about some of them this morning.

For the last year with your help, we have put more great conservative ideas into use than perhaps ever before in American history. What a nice picture that is. Look at that. I would love to watch that guy speak. Oh, boy. Oh, I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks. I work hard at it. Doesn’t look bad. Hey, we’re hanging in. We’re hanging in. We’re hanging in there, right? Together we’re hanging in. We have confirmed a record number, so important, of circuit court judges and we’re going to be putting in a lot more.

And they will interpret the law as written and we have confirmed an incredible new Supreme Court justice, a great man, Neil Gorsuch. Right. We have passed massive, biggest in history, tax cuts and reforms. I don’t use the word reform, there was a lot of reform too, very positive — I don’t use it. And when we were first doing it I told everybody, everybody gathered, I said, just talk about tax cuts. People don’t know what reform means. They think reform might mean it is going up. And I said, do tax cuts.

Thank you. How did he get in here, Matt? Boy. Okay. Just for the media, the fake news back there, they took very good care of him. They were very gentle. He was very obnoxious. It was only one person. So we have thousands of people here. So, listen, tomorrow the headline will be protesters disturb the Trump — one person, folks. Doesn’t deserve a mention. Doesn’t deserve a headline. The headline tomorrow, disrupters of CPAC. One person. And he was very nice. We looked at him, he immediately left. Okay. Now, I’ve heard it too often.

You’ll have one person and you can hardly even hear. The biggest disturbance are you people. You know why? He’ll say something, nobody hears him, because — and then the crowd will start screaming at him and then all of a sudden we start — and that’s okay. You have to show your spirit, right? You have to show your spirit. It is true.

So we passed the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country and it was called tax cut and reform. And I said to our people, don’t use the word reform. Because we’re going to go with the tax reform act. I said no wonder for 45 years nothing has been passed. Because people want tax cuts. And they don’t know what reform means. Reform can mean you’re going to pay more tax.

So I convinced politicians who have done this all their lives, and they do a great job in many cases, this is — the tax reform act of whatever year we want to put, okay. So they have the tax reform act and that was it. And now it was called the tax act tax cut act and jobs, we had to add jobs into it, because we’re picking up a tremendous number of jobs. 2.7 million jobs. 2.7. So now people hear tax cuts, and it has been popular.

Remember, it started off a little slow. Then it got passed. We had some great help. I will say we had some great help in the Senate, and the House, we have guys here today, we have a lot of Congressmen, we have a lot of senators, we had a lot of help, and we got it passed, just — it was not easy.

We didn’t have one Democrat vote and I think that’s going to cost them in the midterms. I know that whoever wins the presidency has a disadvantage for whatever reason in the midterms. You know what happens? I’m trying to figure it out. Historically, if you win the presidency, you don’t do well two years later. And you know what, we can’t let that happen and I know what happens. Finally figured it out. Nobody has been able to explain it. It just happens.

Statistically, almost all of the time, for many years, what happens is you fight so hard to win the presidency. You fight, fight, fight. And now only two years, that’s a very short period and by the time you start campaigning, it is a year. And now you got to go and fight again. But you just won. So nobody has that same drive that they had. So you end up not doing that well, because the other side is going — they’re crazed, and, by the way, they’re crazed anyway, these people. They are really crazed. Right.

So I kept trying to say, why is this? But it is just there. So the great enthusiasm, you know, you’re sitting back, you’re watching television, maybe I don’t have to vote today, we just won the presidency, and then we get clobbered and we can’t let that happen. We get clobbered in ’18, and we can’t let that happen. Only because we are so happy, we pass so many things, honestly, and I’ll say — I’ll use the word, my administration as opposed to me, my administration, I think, has had the most successful first year in the history of the presidency.

I really believe that. I really believe it. I really believe it. So, I mean, judges, regulations, everything. And the beautiful thing, the beautiful thing about the tax cuts is nobody thought we could do it. Again, we had to get 100 percent of our vote. And nobody thought we could do it. And, frankly, to me, we got it, and it turned out to be one of the most popular things, and, by the way, for the Republicans in this room, of which I assume — would you say — is it 99 percent, Matt, or 100 percent? I would hope it is close to — you know what? We probably have some Democrats that want to come over.

We have a great governor from West Virginia that left the Democratic Party, big Jim, and he came over to the Republican Party. So people are sitting there, and they’re saying, we just had that great victory. Let’s in the vote, let’s go to a movie, the Republican Party, we’re going to do great, and then they end up losing. So you got to keep up the enthusiasm.

Now what happens, by the way, they lose, and then you have the presidential election coming up again, and you clobber them because everybody gets off their ass and they get out and they work. Right. And they work. And they work and work and work. And you end up winning the presidency again. And we should do that, hopefully, we’re going to do that very easily. But never, never — we have to worry, right now we have a big race coming up, you have to get out, you have to get that enthusiasm, keep it going.

See the word really is complacent. People get complacent. It is a natural instinct. You just won, and now you’re happy and you’re complacent. Don’t be complacent. Don’t be complacent. If they get in, they will repeal your tax cuts, they will put judges in that you wouldn’t believe, they’ll take away your Second Amendment, which we will never allow to happen, they’ll take away your Second Amendment. Remember that. They will take away — thank you.

They will take away those massive tax cuts, and they will take away your Second Amendment. By the way, if you only had a choice of one, what would you rather have, the second amendment or tax cuts? Second Amendment, tax cuts? Second Amendment? I’m going to leave it at the Second Amendment. I don’t want to get into that battle. All right.

We’re going to say you want — Matt, we’re going to say you want the Second Amendment the most. We’re going to get them all. And, remember this, remember this, we have gotten, you know, somebody got on television recently and said, actually, this is the first time I can remember, Trump made campaign promises. He may be the only person that actually fulfilled more promises that he made. I think that’s true. I fulfilled more promises. But we have a very crooked media. We had a crooked candidate too, by the way. But we have — we have a very — we have a very, very crooked media.

I will say this, folks, everything that is turning out now, it is amazing, it has come full circle, boy, have they committed a lot of atrocities when you look. When you look. Have they done things that are wrong?

But remember this, not only did we get the tax cuts, which everybody said we wouldn’t get, and, by the way, repealed in that tax cut the individual mandate, which is tremendous. This is where you’re forced to pay in order not to have health care. Is that great? You pay for the privilege of not having health care. So you subsidize lots of other people. That’s gone. I know people came up to me with tears in their eyes and saying, I’m forced to pay not to have health care. Very unfair.

And, by the way, we’re having tremendous plans coming out now, health care plans, at a fraction of the cost that are much better than Obamacare. And except for one senator, who came into a room at 3:00 in the morning, and went like that [thumbs down], we would have had health care, too. We would have had health care too. Think of that.

But I think we may be better off the way we’re doing it. Piece by piece by piece, Obamacare is just being wiped out. The individual mandate essentially wipes it out. I think we may be better off. And people are getting great health care plans and we’re not finished yet. But, remember, one person walked into a room, when he was supposed to go this way, and he said he was going this way, and he walked in and he went this way and everyone said, what happened? What was that all about? Boy, oh, boy, who was that? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to be controversial, so I won’t use his name. Okay. What a mess.

But, it is all happening anyway. It is all happening anyway. And we’ve, at the same time, eliminated a record number of job-killing regulations and people are going back to work. Alright. People are going back to work. So, you know, the fake news always — if I say something a little off, next day headline, he misrepresented — I have to be careful. But in the history of presidents, no president, and I’m saying no president, maybe they’ll find if I was off by two, but we’re here one year, no president, I read it in lots of good papers, actually, but they’ll change the story when I say it. No president has ever cut so many regulations in their entire term. Okay. As we have cut in less than a year. And it is my opinion that the regulations had as big an impact as these massive tax cuts that we have given. So I really believe it.

We have ended the war on American energy, we were in war. And we have ended the war on beautiful, clean, coal, one of our great natural resources. Very important for our defense, coal, very important for our defense, because we have it. We don’t have to send it through pipes, we don’t have to get it from foreign countries. We have more than anybody. And they wanted to end it, and our miners have been mistreated and are not being mistreated anymore. We’re doing tremendous business.

I was in Vietnam and the Prime Minister and the President of Vietnam were there. And we have a massive deficit with them like we do with everybody else because these presidents have just let it go to hell. We have the worst trade deals you’ve ever seen. So we’re changing it. So I said, we have too big a deficit with Vietnam, I’m not happy. He said, well, but we’re going to — I said my call. My call. He said, we have bought coal from West Virginia and other places, and it is the finest coal we have ever used, it is interesting. And West Virginia is doing great. You look at what is happening in West Virginia. You look at what’s happening in Pennsylvania. You look at what’s happening in Ohio. And you look at what’s happening in Wyoming. You look at what’s happening all over. It is like a different world.

And, remember this, virtually as soon as I got into office, we approved the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipelines which never would have been approved. And we announced our withdrawal from the totally disastrous job-killing, wealth-knocking out, you know, it knocked out our wealth, or it would have, they basically wanted to take our wealth away. They didn’t want us to use our wealth power. We knocked out the Paris Climate Accord. Would have been a disaster. Would have been a disaster for our country.

You know, basically it said you have a lot of oil and gas that we found, you know, technology has been amazing. And we found things that we never knew. But we have massive, just about the top in the world, we have massive energy reserves, we have coal, we have so much. And basically they said you can’t use it.

What it does is it makes us uncompetitive with other countries. It is not going to happen. I told him. Not going to happen. And, you know, China, their agreement didn’t kick in until 2030. Right. Our agreement kicks in immediately. Russia, they’re allowed to go back into the 1990s which was not a clean environmental time. Other countries, big countries, India, and others, we had to pay because they considered them a growing country. They were a growing country. I said, what are we, are we allowed to grow too? Are we allowed to grow? They called India a developing nation. They called China a developing nation. But the United States, we’re developed, we can pay.

So, folks, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you what, it is amazing how many people understood the Paris accord because it sounds so good. It is like some of the environmental regulations that I cut. They have the most beautiful titles. And sometimes that’s — look, I’m going to close my eyes and sign this, because, you know what, I’m going to get killed on this one. I get so much thanks. The country knows what I’m doing.

We couldn’t build, we couldn’t farm. If you had a puddle on your land, they called it a lake for the purposes of environmentals. It is crazy. It is crazy. And I signed certain bills, I would have farmers behind me and have house builders, home builders behind me. And these are tough people. Strong people. They fought hard. They worked all their lives hard. And half of them would be crying. Because we gave them their property back. We gave them the right to earn a living. They couldn’t do it.

They couldn’t do what they had to do. We gave them their property back, we gave them their dignity back.

By the way, you don’t mind if I go off script a little bit? It is sort of boring. It is a little boring. Beautiful speech, everything is wonderful. But a little boring. We have to, you know — but we gave them their dignity back. And that’s why our country is doing record business. We’re doing record business. We’re doing business and you have to look at the fundamentals. Companies are pouring back into this country, pouring back. Not like — when did you hear about car companies coming back into Michigan and coming to Ohio and expanding? When do you — you never heard that. You hear they’re leaving.

I’ve been talking about it for 20 years. I was a private sector guy. For whatever reason, I always had these guys, always covered me much more than anybody else. I always got a lot of these characters. They used to treat me so good too until I ran for office. I used to get the greatest publicity. Friend of mine said, you used to be the king of getting great publicity. What happened? I said, well, I have some views that they’re opposed to for a lot of bad reasons. A lot of really bad reasons.

But, but, when you look at what is happening to our country, it is incredible. And the fundamentals are so strong. The stock market, I just see with all of the ups and downs, since election day, is up 37 percent from — 37 percent. Now, it did a little bit of a correction. In fact, I started to say, you know, in it for 13, 14 months from the election. I say, is this ever going down a little bit? This is a little embarrassing.

It was up 100, up 200, up 1,000, up 150. Up 90, up 63. I said, goodness, that’s better. Hey, we have got seven years to go, folks. We got a long time to go.

So, thank you, everybody. You’ve been amazing. You’ve been amazing. What Matt didn’t say, when I was here 2011, I made a speech. And I was received with such warmth and they give, you know, they used to give, I don’t know if Matt does that, he may not want to be controversial, but they used to give the best speech of CPAC. Do they still do that? You better pick me, or I’m not coming back.

But — and I got these — everybody, they loved that speech. That was, I think, Matt, I would say that might have been the first real political speech I made. It was a love fest, 2011, I believe the time was. And a lot of people remembered and they said, we want Trump, we want Trump.

And after a few years go by and say here I am, let’s see what I can do. They said, you need 270 votes. You need the electoral college, which, by the way, is much tougher than the popular vote. The popular vote would be so much easier. You go to three or four states and you just go and you just do a great job. Hillary forgot that, you know. She went to the states. What is she doing? Why does she keep going back to California? Crazy. Next time they’re going to remember Iowa, they’re going to remember Ohio, remember. They spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania to no avail.

They spent a lot of money, they spent a lot of money in North Carolina, the great state of North Carolina. We did very well there. We have a great person in the room, Mark Meadows, from North Carolina. Where is Mark? Where is Mark? And Deb. And we have Jim Jordan, warriors, warriors all.

We have a lot of great — we have a lot of great people here. But, you know, we’re just — we hit a chord and if you remember, 2011, probably that was the beginning of what we have done, and hopefully at the end of a period of time people are going to say, thank you, because it is not easy. We’re fighting a lot of forces. There are forces that are doing the wrong thing. They’re just doing the wrong thing. I don’t want to talk about what they have in mind. But they do the wrong thing. But we’re doing what is good for our country for the long-term, viability and survival.

Like for instance, $700 billion got approved for military. Our military was going to hell. We declined to certify the terrible one-sided Iran nuclear deal. It was a horrible deal. Whoever heard you give $150 billion to a nation that has no respect for you whatsoever? They’re saying death to America. Well, they’re signing the agreement. If somebody said death to America, while I’m signing an agreement, I say what’s going on, folks? I’m not signing.

They kept going. Kerry may be the worst negotiator I’ve ever seen. How about — how about this guy, how about Obama, of course, he’s the one, but how about $1.8 billion in cash? Did you ever see what a million dollars in 100 dollar bills, a lot of people do it as a promotion, it is big, it is big. Now take that, go to $1.8 billion in cash, $1.8 billion, for what? For what? Why did we do this? Why did we do it?

Anyway, we didn’t certify and lots of interesting things are happening with that whole mess. But we have to treat people that treat us well, we treat them well. People that treat us badly, we treat them much worse than they could ever imagine. That’s the way it has to be. That’s the way it has to be.

We officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Every president campaigned on we’re going to recognize Jerusalem as a capital of Israel. Everybody. For many presidents. You’ve been reading it. They never pulled it off. And I now know why. Because I put the word out that I may do it. Right. I said I’d do it in my campaign. That usually means, unless I find something, I’m going to do it.

I was hit by more countries and more pressure and more people calling, begging me, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, I said, we have to do it. It is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do. We have to do it. And I did it. But every other president really lied because they campaigned on it. That was always a big part of the campaign. They got into office and they never did it.

So I understand why they didn’t do it. It was a tremendous campaign against it, so incredible. But, you know what, the campaign for it was also incredible. And we did the right thing. So we have kept our promises, I said, to rebuild our military. Eliminating the defense sequester, which is a disaster. And I don’t know if you saw the number $700 billion, you know ultimately that comes before everything else. We can talk about lots of things.

If we don’t have a strong military, you might be allowed into this room some day, okay. You may not have your houses, your homes, your beautiful communities, we better take care of our military, these are the greatest people and we’re going to take care of our veterans, we’re going to take care of the vets. We have been doing a good job on the vets. And after years of rebuilding, other nations, we rebuild other nations. We rebuild other nations, and give a lot of money. And we don’t ever say, hey, you got to help.

We’re finally rebuilding our nation, we’re rebuilding our nation. And we’re restoring our confidence and our pride, all of us here today are united by the same timeless values. We defend our constitution and we believe in the wisdom of our founders, our constitution is great. We support the incredible men and women of law enforcement. True. We know that a strong nation must have strong borders. We celebrate our history and our heroes and we believe young Americans should be taught to love their country, and to respect its traditions.

You’re getting the wall. Don’t worry. I heard some — getting the wall.

Had a couple of these characters in the back say, oh, he really doesn’t want the wall. He just used that for campaigning. I said, are you — can you believe it? You know, I say every time I hear that, the wall gets ten feet higher, you know that. Every single time. Okay. Now, we’re going to have the wall. Or they’re not going to have what they want. We have a problem. We need more Republicans. We have a group of people that vote against us in a bloc.

They’re good at two things. Resisting obstruction. Resisting obstruction. And they stick together. They do. They always vote in a bloc. It is very rare that you get your cuts. I mean, we’re going to be fighting these people in the ‘18 election, we’re going to be fighting people that voted against the tax cuts because the tax cuts are phenomenal and popular and helping people and helping our country.

You saw Apple just brought $350 billion in, Exxon brought in $50 billion. So we’re going to be fighting. We need more Republicans to vote. We want to get our agenda. Now what we have to do is in order to get a vote to fix our military, we have to give them $100 billion in stuff that nobody in this room including me wants in many cases. It is terrible. We need more Republicans. That’s why you have to get out and you have to fight for 18, you have to do it. We salute our great American flag, we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance. And we all proudly stand for the national anthem.

Above all else, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are at the center of American life. We know that. Because in America we don’t worship government, we worship God.

Our nation’s motto is “In God we trust.” This week, our nation lost an incredible leader. Who devoted his life to helping us understand what those words really mean. Leader. He was a leader, a great man. We will never forget the historic crowds, that voice, the energy, and the profound faith of a preacher named Billy Graham.

Great family. They were for us, I’ll tell you, they were for us. Right from the beginning they were for us. As a young man, Billy decided to devote his life to God. That choice not only changed his life, it changed our country and, indeed, it even changed the world.

Reverend Graham’s belief in the power of God’s word gave hope to millions and millions who listened to him with his very beautiful but very simple message, God loves you. And a very special tribute because it is almost never done. On Wednesday, we will celebrate Billy Graham’s life as he lies in honor in the rotunda of our capital.

One day, Wednesday until Thursday, about 11:00 on Wednesday, I bet those lines are going to be long and beautiful because he deserves it. Not everybody deserves it. But very few people, you look back, Ronald Reagan, so honored, very few people are so honored. That’s a big thing. And he really almost more than anybody you can think of, he deserves to be in the rotunda. That’s going to be very special.

Wednesday, at 11:00. And Paul and Mitch and the whole group, they worked very hard to make it all happen. So we want to thank them too. Everywhere you go, all over the country, and cities small and large, Americans of all faiths reach out to our creator for strength, for inspiration, and for healing. Great time for healing.

In times of grief and hardship, we turn to prayer for solace and comfort. In recent days our entire nation has been filled with terrible pain and sorrow over the evil massacre in a great community, Parkland, Florida. This senseless act of mass murder shocked our nation and broke our hearts.

This week, I had the honor of meeting with students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with families who have lost their children, in prior shootings, great families, great people.

With members of the local community, right here in Washington, D.C. Our whole nation was moved by their strength and by their courage. We listened to their heart-wrenching stories. We ask them for ideas and pledged to them and I can speak for all of the senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen, all the people in this room that are involved in this decision, that we will act, we will do something. We will act.

With us on Wednesday was one of the families whose daughter didn’t come home last week. A beautiful young woman named Meadow Pollack, incredible family, incredible people. You’ve probably seen her picture. She had a beautiful, beautiful smile. And a beautiful life. So full of promise. We wish there was something, anything we could do to bring Meadow and all of the others back. There are not enough tears in the world to express our sadness and anguish for her family, and for every family that has lost a precious loved one. No family should ever have to go in and suffer the way these families have suffered.

They have suffered beyond anything that I have ever witnessed. A father drops his daughter off at school, kisses her good-bye, waves to her, she’s walking up the path, and never sees her alive again. Gets a call, can’t believe it, thinks it is a nightmare, wants to wake up from the nightmare.

So we want to hear ideas from Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs about how we can improve security at our schools, tackle the issue of mental health because this was a sick person. Very sick. And we had a lot of warning about him being sick. This wasn’t a surprise. To the people that knew him, this wasn’t even a little bit. In fact, some said we’re surprised it took so long. So what are we doing? What are we doing?

We want to ensure that when there are warning signs, we can act and act very quickly. Why do we protect our airports and our banks, our government buildings, but not our schools. It is time to make our schools a much harder target for attackers. We don’t want them in our schools. We don’t want them. When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones, it just puts our students in far more danger. Far more danger.

Well trained, gun adept teachers and coaches and people that work in those buildings, people that were in the Marines for 20 years, and retired, people in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, people that are adept, adept with weaponry, and with guns, they teach.

I mean, I don’t want to have 100 guards standing with rifles all over the school. You do a conceal carry permit. And this would be a major deterrent, because these people are inherently cowards. If they thought like if this guy thought that other people would be shooting bullets back at him, he wouldn’t have gone to that school. He wouldn’t have gone there. It is a gun-free zone. It says this is a gun-free zone. Please check your guns way far away. And what happens is they feel safe. There is nobody going to come at them. This way you may have — and, remember, if you use this school as an example, this is a very big school. With tremendous floor area and a lot of acreage, a big, big school, good school. A big, big school. You would have to have 150 real guns.

Look, you had one guard, he didn’t turn out to be too good, I will tell you that. He turned out to be not good. He was not a credit to law enforcement that I can tell you. That I can tell you. But as I have been talking about this idea, and I feel it is a great idea, but some people that are good people are opposed to it, don’t like the idea of teachers doing it, I’m not talking about teachers.

CNN went on, they said, Donald Trump wants all teachers, okay, fake news, folks. Fake news. News. I don’t want a person that has never handled a gun that wouldn’t know what a gun looks like to be armed.

But out of your teaching population, out of your teaching population, you have 10 percent, 20 percent, very gun adept people. Military people, law enforcement people, they teach. They teach. And something I thought of this morning, you know what else, I thought of it since I found and watched Peterson, the deputy who didn’t go into the school, because he didn’t want to go into the school, okay. He was tested under fire and that wasn’t a good result. But you know what I thought of, as soon as I saw that, these teachers, and I’ve seen them, and a lot of schools where they had problems, these teachers love their students and the students love their teachers in many cases. These teachers love their students. And these teachers are talented with weaponry and with guns. And that’s — they feel safe.

And I would rather have somebody that loves their students and wants to protect their students than somebody standing outside that doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know the students, and frankly for whatever reason decided not to go in even though he heard lots of shots being fired inside. The teachers, and the coaches, and other people in the building, the Dean, the Assistant Dean, the Principal, they can — they love their people, they want to protect these kids. And I think we’re better with that and this may be 10 percent or 20 percent of the population of teachers, et cetera. It is not all of them. But you would have a lot and you would tell people that they’re inside, and the beauty is it is concealed. Nobody would ever see it. Unless they needed it. It is concealed.

So this crazy man, who walked in, wouldn’t even know who it is that has it. That’s good. That’s not bad. That’s good. And the teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened. They love their students. They love those students, folks. Remember that. They love their students. And I’m telling you that would work because we need offensive capability. We can’t just say, it is a gun-free school, we’ll do it a little bit better. You say what happens outside. The students now leave school, and you got a thousand students, you got 3,500 at the school we’re talking about. But you have a thousand students standing outside, the teachers are out there also, if a madman comes along, we have the same problem, but it is outside of the school. Or they drive cars. There are a lot of things that can happen. I want to stop it.

And I know it is a little controversial to say, but I have to say since I started this two days ago, a lot of people were totally opposed to it and now agree. They love their students. They don’t want their students to be killed or to be hurt. So we have to do something that works. And one of the big measures that we will do and everybody in this room, I think, has to agree, and there is nobody that loves the Second Amendment more than I do, and there is nobody that respects the NRA, the friends of mine, they backed us all, great people, patriots, but great people. But we really do have to strengthen up, really strengthen up background checks. We have to do that. And we have to do it for the mentally ill, we have to do very, very — we don’t want people that are mentally ill to be having any form of weaponry. We have to be very strong on that.

So we’re going to do that and I really believe that Congress is going to get it through this time and they have a different leader. They have somebody that wants to get it through, not somebody that just all talk, no action, like so many of these folks. This is somebody that wants to get it through. But I also want to protect, we need a hardened sight. Has to be hardened. Can’t be soft. They’ll sneak if through a window, some way, and you are standing there, totally unprotected. You know the five great soldiers from three years ago, three of them were world-class marksmen, on a military base in a gun-free zone, asked to check their guns quite far away. And a maniac walked in, guns blazing, killed all five of them. He wouldn’t have had a chance if these world-class marksmen had, on a military base, access to their guns.

I’m going to look at that whole policy on military bases. If we can’t have — all five were killed. All five. The guy wouldn’t have had a chance. We’re going to look at that whole military base gun-free zone. If we can’t have our military holding guns, it is pretty bad. We had a number of instances on military bases. You know that. We want to protect our military. We want to make — we’re going to make our military stronger and better than it ever has been before. We also need to create a culture in our community that cherishes life and human dignity. That’s part of what we’re talking about. A culture that condemns violence and never glorifies violence. We need to force the real human connections and turn classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors that want to fight for us.

We’re not just having a conversation about school safety. You’ve had conversations, in all fairness, I’m pretty new on this job, we’re here a little more than a year, I’ve been watching this stuff go on for 20 years. The president gets up, everybody is enthusiastic for the first couple of days, and it fades, fades, fades, nothing ever gets done. We want to see if we can get it done. Let’s get it done right. We really owe it to our country. I’ve been watching for a long time. Seen a lot of words. And I’ve seen very little action. And, you know, if you think about it, most of it is just common sense. It is not: Do you love guns? Do you hate guns? It is common sense. It is all common sense. And some of the strongest advocates about what I’m saying are the strongest advocates, I know them very well, political people, the strongest advocates for the Second Amendment.

But this is common sense. In addition to securing our schools, we’re also implementing a strategy to secure our streets. We want our kids to be safe everywhere they go, whether they’re in a classroom, walking home from school or just outside playing with their friends.

Every child deserves to grow up in a safe community surrounded by a loving family and to have a future filled with opportunity and with hope. Thank you. Thank you. Just not fair. Reducing violent crime in America is a top priority for my administration. And we will do whatever it takes to get it done. No talk. We’re going to do what it takes to get it done. As you’ve seen pretty well-reported that we’re significantly increasing gun prosecutions by tremendous percentages. And we’re working to get violent offenders off our streets and behind bars and get them behind bars quickly for a long time, or get them out of our country.

In 2017, we brought cases against more violent offenders than any administration in a quarter of a century, more than any administration and we’re just gearing up. We have tough people. I’ll tell you what, when you deal with ms-13, the only thing they understand is toughness. They don’t want anything. All they understand is toughness. If that ICE agent or border patrol agent is tougher than them, they respect him.

We have the toughest guys you’ve ever seen. We got tough. They don’t respect anything else. And they shouldn’t be in our country. They were let in for years, they shouldn’t be. And we’re getting them out. Our administration prosecuted more people for federal firearm charges than has been done in more than a decade. And, again, we’re just gearing up. We convicted 1,200 gang members and nearly 500 human traffickers. You know what human trafficking — who would think that we have this in this age? And with our foreign partners we have helped charge or arrest more than 4,000 members of the savage gang that we talked about, ms-13. They don’t like guns. You know why? They’re not painful enough.

These are animals. They cut people. They cut them. They cut them up in little pieces, and they want them to suffer. And we take them into our country. Because our immigration laws are so bad, and when we catch them, it is called catch and release. We have to, by law, catch them and then release them. Catch and release. And I can’t get the Democrats and nobody has been able to for years to approve common-sense measures that when we catch these animal killers, we can lock them up, and throw away the keys. In 2017, our brave ICE officers arrested more than 100,000 criminal aliens who have committed tens of thousands of crimes. And, believe me, these are great people. They cannot — the laws are just against us. They’re against — they’re against safety. They don’t make sense.

And you meet with Democrats and they’re always fighting for the criminal. They’re not fighting for law-abiding citizens. They’re always fighting for the criminal. Doesn’t make sense. Here are just some of the criminal charges and convictions for the aliens arrested by ice. 11,000 charges or convictions for sex crimes. 48,000 for assault. 13,000 for burglary. 1800 for killing people. We’re cracking down on sanctuary cities, can you believe this, where they protect. That’s another one.

Because we want our cities to be sanctuaries for law-abiding Americans. Not for criminals.

And, by the way, the Senate Democrats and the House Democrats have totally abandoned DACA. They don’t even talk to me about it. They have totally abandoned. We get the reputation like DACA, it is not Republican. Well, let me tell you, it is Republican. Because we want to do something about DACA, get it solved after all these years. The Democrats are being totally unresponsive, don’t want to do anything about DACA. I’m telling you. And it is very possible that DACA won’t happen and it is not because of the Republicans, it is because of the Democrats. And, frankly, you better elect more Republicans, folks, or it will never happen. The Democrats voted in favor of sanctuary cities. In other words, they voted to protect criminal aliens instead of voting to protect the American citizens.

To secure our country, we are calling on Congress to build a great border wall to stop dangerous drugs and criminals from pouring into our country. And now they’re willing to give us the wall. But they don’t want to give us any of the laws to keep these people out. So we’re going to get the wall. But they don’t want to give us all of the other, chain migration, lottery, think of a lottery. You have a country, they put names in, you think they’re giving us their good people? Not too many of you people are going to be lottery. So we pick out people. Then they turn out to be horrendous. And we don’t understand why. They’re not giving us their best people, folks. They’re not giving us — use your heads.

They’re giving us — it is a lottery. I don’t want people coming into this country with a lottery. I want people coming into this country based on merit, based on merit. I want people, and we all want to be admitting people, who have skills, who can support themselves financially, who can contribute to our economy, who will love our people and who will share our values, who will love our country. I don’t want people who drive a car at 100 miles an hour down the west side highway, and kill eight innocent victims and destroy the lives of 14 more.

Nobody talks about that. Nobody ever talks about the people that have been so horribly injured, who lose legs and arms in Manhattan where I used to spend my time. I know it very well, this stretch along the west side highway, people run in order to stay in shape, they want to — they want to be healthy, they want to look good, they run, they run, all the time, I see it. They run. We work in different ways. But they run. But think of this, they run. And they’re so —they want to be fit. They’re proud people. They want to be fit. And they’re running up and down West Side. It is beautiful. It is a beautiful thing. And this maniac takes a car going down the highway and just turns to the right and he kills eight. He really badly wounded 12 to 14 other people.

So somebody, think of it, runs to stay in shape, leaves the house, is jogging along, working hard, ends up going home, two months later with no leg or with no arm or with two legs missing. Nobody ever talks about them. They talk about the people rightfully that were killed. But they don’t talk about the people that — whose lives have just changed. Just changed. They don’t talk about that. This guy came in through chain migration. And a part of the lottery system. They say 22 people came in with him. In other words, an aunt, an uncle, a grandfather, a mother, a father, whoever came in. A lot of people came in. That’s chain migration. Let’s see how those people are doing, by the way. We have got to change our way. Merit system. I want merit system.

You know what is happening? All these companies are coming into our country, they’re all coming into our country, and when they come in, we need people that are going to work. I’m telling you, we need workers now. We need workers. But when I walked in today, did anyone ever hear me do the snake during the campaign? Because I had five people outside say, could you do the snake? I said, well, people have heard it. Who hasn’t heard the snake? You should read it anyway. Let’s do it anyway. I’ll do it. Okay. Should we do it? Now, this was a rock ‘N’ roll song, little amendments, a rock ‘N’ roll song, but every time I do it, people — and you have to think of this in terms of immigration. I want people to come into our country. And I want people that are going to help us.

I don’t want people that are going to come in and be accepting all of the gifts of our country for the next 50 years and contribute nothing. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. I want people that are going to help and people that are going to go to work for Chrysler, who is now moving from Mexico into Michigan. And so many others. And apple, by the way. And fox con in Wisconsin. They’re going to need 25,000 workers. I want people that can come in and get to work and work hard, even if it means a learning period that is fine. But I want people that are going to come in, and work. And I want people that love us, and look at security and they want you to be safe and they want to be safe. I want great people coming into this country. I don’t want people coming in the way they do now. Because I want people that contribute. So this is called — this is called the snake.

And think of it in terms of immigration and you may love it or you may say isn’t that terrible? Okay. If you say isn’t that terrible, who cares. Because the way they treat me, that’s peanuts compared to the way they treat me. Okay. Immigration.

On her way to work one morning, down the path along the lake,
a tender-hearted woman saw a poor, half-hearted frozen snake.
His pretty colored skin had been all frosted, with the dew.
Poor thing, she cried. I’ll take you in. And I’ll take care of you.
Take me in, oh tender woman, take me in for heaven’s sake,
take me in, oh tender woman, sighed the vicious snake.
She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk.
And laid him by her fire side with some honey and some milk.
She hurried home from work that night, and soon as she arrived
she found that pretty snake she had taken in had been revived.
Take me in, oh tender woman, take me in for heaven’s sake.
Take me in, oh tender woman, sighed the vicious snake.
She clutched him to her bosom. You’re so beautiful, she cried.
But if I hadn’t brought you in by now, surely you would have died.
She stroked his pretty skin again, and kissed and held him tight.
But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite.
Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in for heaven’s sake.
Take me in, oh tender woman. Sighed the vicious snake.
I saved you, cried the woman. And you’ve bitten me, heavens why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.
Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grin.
You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.

And that’s what we’re doing with our country, folks. We’re letting people in. And it is going to be a lot of trouble. It is only getting worse. But we’re giving you protection like never before. Our law enforcement is doing a better job than we have ever done before. And we love our country. And we’re going to take care of our country. Okay. We’re going to take care of our country. So just in finishing, our country is starting to do very well. Our economy is blazing. Jobs are at a record level. Jobs are so good. 2.7 million jobs created since the election.

Unemployment claims have reached a 45-year low. African-American unemployment has reached the lowest level in our history. Hispanic unemployment has reached the lowest level in our history. Hispanic unemployment has reached the lowest level in our history. Women, women, unemployment is at the lowest level in 18 years. Wages are rising for the first time in many, many years. Small business confidence is at a record high.

And thanks to our massive tax cuts, millions of Americans are getting to keep a great percentage of their money instead of paying it to a government that throws it out the window.

So I just leave you with this. We have to fight Nancy Pelosi. Want to give your money away. They want to give your money away. They want to end your tax cuts. They want to do things that you wouldn’t even believe. Including taking your Second Amendment rights away. They will do that. They will do that. So we have to get out there and we have to fight in ‘18 like never before. Just the way you fought with us. Just the way you fought with us. You fought so hard and you were so tough and you were so smart, you were so smart.

And, you know what, I know for a fact you did the right thing, we’re looking at the numbers and the numbers, even they have to give credit for the kind of numbers that we’re producing.

Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Under my administration, the era of economic surrender is over. We’re renegotiating trade deals that are so bad, whether it is NAFTA, or whether it is world trade organizations, which created China, created — you look at China, it was going along like this, we opened stupidly this deal. And China has been like a rocket ship ever since. And now, last year, we had almost a $500 billion trade deficit with China. We can’t have that. We can’t have that. I have great respect for president XI, but we can’t have that. We have to do what we have to do.

We can’t just let countries, an example, Mexico, we have $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico. What does that tell you? You know what it tells you? NAFTA is no good. It never was any good. But for some reason nobody ever changed it.

They emptied our factories, you got to see the car plants and the auto plants in Mexico, like, you’ve never seen anything like it before. I want those companies and they’re starting, I want them back here. I want them back here. They’re going to come back here too. And we want to make our neighbors happy. But we can’t continuously have other nations taking advantage of the United States, like never before. This has gone on for a long time. This has gone on for longer than — the last administration was a disaster. But this has gone on for much longer than the last administration. And we have got to change it. We’re going to change it. So we’re renegotiating deals.

And hate to say it, but if we can’t make a fair deal for the United States, we will terminate the deal and we’ll start all over again. Going to have to do it. So under my administration and with my help, don’t forget, you, many of you, were the forgotten people. You were the people that when the polls came out, they didn’t know that you existed. The Democrats are trying to figure out who they are because they want to get you back. But you were people, we had people that never voted. But they’re great patriots, but they never saw anybody they wanted to vote for. Then they go to the election, they have trump, pence, trump, pence, hats, all sorts of things, trump over here. Make America great again, hats. So our country is starting to do well.

We are going to make it greater, better, safer, than it ever was before. The reason is you. This has been a great movement, they try like hell, they cannot stand what we have done. But we’re doing the right thing. We’re even doing the right thing for them. They just don’t know it yet. They just don’t know it yet. Even the media, the media will absolutely support me, sometime prior to the election. All those horrible people back there, they’re going to support me. You know why? Because if somebody else won, their ratings would go down, they all would be out of business. Nobody would watch. They all would be out of business. So I just want to tell you that we are going to win. I’d love you to get out there, work really hard for ‘18. We need more Republicans to keep the tax cuts, keep all of this going. And I love you, I respect you, I appreciate everything you’ve done for the country.

I appreciate everything you’ve done. I do want to say because people have asked, North Korea, we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. And frankly hopefully something positive can happen. We will see. Hopefully something positive can happen. But that just was announced and I wanted to let you know. We have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for everything. You’ve been incredible partners. Incredible partners. And I will let you know in the absolute strongest of terms, we’re going to make America great again and I will never, ever, ever let you down. Thank you very much. Thank you.